Have you stopped giving your goals some love yet?
This week folks everywhere expressed their love for each other (PS I love you too).
There’s one area of your life where you might need to show some love—your goals.
The Best Intentions
The third Monday of January was what some call “Blue Monday”- the day most people gave up on their New Year’s Resolutions.
You know what happens. Folks get amped up and excited when the clock starts counting down and get ambitious about how different this year will be. And they (we) all start off with the best intentions-cutting down on debt, getting organized and dropping the pandemic 15 plus the holiday 20.
For the first few weeks we hit the ground running hard and we push ourselves to make it happen. But things go sideways.
People start spending again, clutter starts growing and you can finally get on the gym equipment because the crowd thinned out.
The struggle is real.
“Motivation is a fire from within. If someone else tries to light
that fire under you, chances are it will burn very briefly.” -Stephen Covey.
Resolve to cut yourself some slack
When your resolutions fall apart it’s easy to beat yourself up and think that there has to be something wrong with you why you can’t do that thing you were so excited about a few weeks ago.
Here’s the thing THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH YOU! Yes, I yelled at you. I want you to hear me loud and clear. There are so many rational reasons why you may be struggling to work your goal.
Working on your goal means you are going to have to change your behavior and build new habits to get you across the finish line.
Creating new habits is hard work for both your body and your brain. Eventually, even after the best effort, you’re going to hit a wall.
You’re probably suffering from goal fatigue.
Goal fatigue happens when you’re burnt out from having too many
goals or when you run out of energy between goals.
When goal fatigue hits, it’s like a bucket of water on your fire. All your get-up-and-go fizzles out.
What do you do?
Create new habits
To reach your goal, don’t focus so much on the end result that you want. Think about the habits you need to create in order to hit that goal.
Habits are our brains way of automating behaviors and actions that we do over and over again.
The more attention and energy we put into a behavior, the more likely it is that our brains will wake up and find a way to short cut it so we don’t have to spend so much energy every time we do it.
Be careful not to overload your brain. If we try to start too many new things at the same time, it’s literally exhausting. Focus on one thing at a time and build it up to the next big thing.
- Start small: break your goal down into tiny bite size pieces that are easier to tackle.
- Create connections: think of a good habit that you already have. Use it as a stepping stone by finding a way to connect it to the new thing that you want to do. (Think of it as the buddy system for your goal).
- Cut yourself some slack: remember those resolutions? Don’t stress yourself out if you haven’t checked in on them since last month. You can always press reset and start again. Think marathon not sprint. Take a deep breath and decide on one thing you really want to work on and see step #1!
I’m kicking off a series on behavior and habits to help you stay on track and learn some tricks along the way.
If you’re already on my list…you’ll see it in your inbox soon. If you’re not on my list, click here to sign up.
Feel free to check in and let me know how you’re doing. What’s one thing you want to get done by this time next year?