The beginning of each year is a popular time to create new resolutions. A recent study revealed that the most popular resolutions regarded physical health, weight loss, and eating habits. Also, after one year, only 55% of responders considered themselves successful in sustaining their resolutions.*
What’s the best approach to setting annual goals to help you make the most progress to achieve your goals and make you feel happy?
Take a ‘helicopter view’ of your life.
For someone leading a busy life or working on a particular goal, it’s easy to get absorbed into a big project or focus on business. However, we feel happy when all areas of our life are in good shape. That’s why, from time to time, it’s useful to take a high-level view and see if your vital spheres are balanced.
Usually, we lead our life within eight vital spheres: health, family and friends, career, finances, spirituality, romance and relationships, personal growth, and fun and recreation.
Once you have an idea of how satisfied you are with each of these spheres, it becomes easier to decide what aspects to prioritise in the coming year and where to spend less time or which activities to delegate.
Consider long-term or ‘life’ goals.
Setting long-term or life goals gives you a long-term vision and motivation to short-term objectives and everyday tasks.
This ‘big picture’ of what you want to achieve over the next 5-10 years should make you feel excited and motivated. This is something that you genuinely want to achieve, and that makes you feel happy and motivated. It’s important to distinguish your genuine long-term goals from others’ expectations and what parents, friends or family expect you to achieve.
If you don’t help life-time goals, one of the objectives could be to spend time brainstorming and finding a vision that will make you feel excited and motivated in the long-term.
‘SMART’ short- and medium-term goals
Once you feel inspired by a long-term goal and have a clear view of how you feel about each vital sphere in your life, it’s exciting to start thinking about how you bring your vision to life. You can do this by setting achievable short-term goals for the next six months, one year and five years.
It’s important to feel comfortable and positive about the direction you choose to achieve each goal. Otherwise, you will start finding excuses not to take specific tasks or activities forward, self-sabotage or procrastinate.
Top tips for goal-setting:
- Take time to brainstorm and review your goals.
- Meditate on specific goals and reflect how you feel about it to help you decide whether it’s genuinely a goal you want to achieve.
- Break down bigger goals into manageable and realistic tasks to make them achievable.
- Think of the outcome of each goal and how you will measure success.
- Delegation is key in achieving certain goals and keeping your vital life spheres balanced. Consider what you can delegate to free up your time to focus on something more substantial.
*A large-scale experiment on New Year’s resolutions: Approach-oriented goals are more successful than avoidance-oriented goals. Martin Oscarsson, Per Carlbring, Gerhard Andersson, Alexander Rozental. December 9, 2020 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0234097