Goal setting for 2014

Hello there and welcome to 2014. I hope this is the year your dreams and aspirations come true; for me, setting goals and objectives really helps with getting closer to my dreams!

In 2013, I set myself small-ish goals each month. I chose a word for the year – change – to give me some focus and guide me through. And you know what? I loved it! Equally important, I sailed through a difficult year and was at my most productive.

This approach of setting monthly goals and having a word for the year isn’t innovative, but it was new to me and really worked so I’d like to share it here as the new year begins.

Reasons (if any are needed)

A year is a long time, even if it now flies by; especially if it flies by, actually.

Resolutions which are vague and are meant to last the year quickly lose momentum and strength. It’s hard to commit to a resolution when you can always start tomorrow and December seems so far away, been there done that… and more often than not, it failed.

Setting monthly goals, you’re giving yourself a chance to make it work for 30 days; at the end of the month, you can re-access, move on, change path, build on whatever you’ve achieved or choose something else.

How I did it

• Word of the year

I needed an overarching strategy – AIM – to roughly guide my goals each month. That was just me, perhaps you can do without. I chose not to and I’m glad I did.

For 2013, my word of the year was change. I wanted to cope better with change and I wanted a lot of things to change around me and within me. Little did I know how important this word would become and how successful it was at keeping me focussed on getting there, step by step, each month.

For 2014, my word of the year is choose. Life is made of choices; this has always been a working mantra for me. This year, I want to focus on the choices I have rather than on what leads to me having those choices.

• Setting goals

I have a scientific brain. I used to be a scientist and I still work with science. This means that I couldn’t just sit down and write stuff I’d like to do over the next 30 days, nope! I had to write SMART objectives: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. I tried to persuade myself on a number of occasions to let go a bit, but in failing that, I gave myself one goal where I could be a bit more vague.

All my goals were time-bound – they were monthly. Check. How did I ensure the other criteria were met? With a little bit of thought and a dash of trial and error earlier in the year. You can do it too.

An example of a SMART goal is “I will run three times a week”. This is specific – I know exactly what to do (unlike “run more”); measurable – I know how many times I have to run to meet my goal; achievable – I know I have the time to do it if I drop the excuses; and relevant – it gets me closer to my overarching aim of changing my fitness level.

To set specific goals, you really have to focus on what you want to achieve, why that is important and how you’re going to do it. Once you have that, your goal is pretty much set. You can then improve it by making it measurable; this will be your measure of success and therefore what really keeps you going when things get tough. By the end of the month, tired as I may have felt, I thought to myself – if I go running this one more time, I will achieve my goal; no rain can keep me at home then!

To ensure your goals are achievable, you have to consider what else is happening during that month in your life. It’s quite pointless for me to aim to run three times a week if I’m on holiday for two weeks and know I won’t pack my running shoes. Check your diary, plan ahead a little bit.

• Tracking progress

Knowing how well you’re doing (or not, to be fair) is a great motivator to keep going. At the end of the month, I would go through what I had achieved in relation to my goals, smile (yep, always!) and feel good about myself. This would then encourage me to set goals for the following month!

• Accountability

I made myself accountable for my goals and outcomes, to my friends and on my blog. At the beginning of each month, I wrote a blog post listing my monthly goals and roughly linked it to my word of the year.

Whilst the whole monthly goals thing is brilliant, making myself accountable gave me that one last push whenever I thought I couldn’t be bothered. And then I had energy again and things happened.

2014

This year, I have chosen choose as my word of the year. I’m looking forward to seeing how it changes the way I see my choices and how it empowers me to pursue my goals and dreams. I will be documenting my journey once again on the blog.

Do you have new year resolutions? Do you break them down into monthly goals? Do you have a word for 2014? Do share below, it would be lovely to know what works for you.

Have a great 2014!

 

 

 

 

(Read more about Joey on the Contributors page or visit her blog, Little Miss Joey)