4 Steps to Making Your Goals Stick

Statistics on Goals: 25% abandon new year resolutions after 1 week. 60% abandon after 6 months. Average person makes the same new year resolution at 10 different times without success.

One of the biggest challenges faced by most of us including many of my coaching clients is keeping up with their New Year Resolutions. 

Most of us know the need to keep our goals SMART - Specific, Measureable, Actionable / Attainable, Realistic and Timebound / trackable. So I am not getting into the basics of setting a goal but rather devoting it to the more challenging question on how to make your goals stick and thus hopefully achieving a breakthrough.

So here are four simple steps - the first three steps guarantees achieving your goals and the fourth enables more goals. 

1. Focus on ONE single goal: Stick to one goal. Yes at any given time, focus all your energy on one single goal. You may have a list of 20 goals that needs to be done, but from that 20 pick one that is most important and the most significant for you. A goal that's going to make a huge difference in your life. This is the goal that is going to get you all excited. So once you are ready with this - congratulations, you are on your way to unlimited success. Let's say your goal is for walking every day

2. Consistently pursue for 30 days: The second step involves putting an action plan - a daily action plan that will get you to accomplish the goal.  Now fix a time slot in your day, a fixed time, say every day morning 8:00 AM you will devote, say 30 minutes or an hour. Choose a time slot that has the highest probability to do this undisturbed. Do it for 5 minutes or 3 hours. The key is being consistent and doing it at a fixed time every single day. You may be wondering why 30 days. That's because we want this to become a habit. Psychologists recommend 20 days. I generally recommend 30 days or a month. So now you are committed to walk every day, say 30 minutes at 8:00 AM

3. Get someone to hold you accountable: Accountability acts as the additional reinforcement to ensure you get past the first 30 days consistently. This can be your spouse, friend or even a coach. If you have come this far with your goal, you are set. The accountability partner will review your progress and encourage you to be consistent.

4. Repeat steps 1 to 3: Once you get past the 30 days - Congratulations! You have been consistent and progressed well towards achieving your goal. Here you have a choice. You can continue your daily habit / routine until you have accomplished your goal and are confident that this has now become part of your habit. Once you have the satisfaction of having won the first victory in achieving your goal, start with your second goal and so on...

This process enables you to even consider achieving 12 goals in 12 months. I call this 12 in 12.  A simple method that can turn your goals into habits.

I hope you like this. If you end up trying this out then i will appreciate if you can share your experience. Tell us how did it go. Maybe you will inspire some more people to follow this practice.

Statistics source: University of Scranton. Journal of Clinical Psychology