Forget?New?Year?resolutions!?Make?your 2018 Goals achievable!

Holly Ransom’s guide to navigating new year success.

Do weight-loss, better finances, good deeds and peak fitness resolutions sound familiar to you? We’ve all made them. We’ve all failed. And yet, when the calendar flips over to December, we panic and promise that we will try again in the new year once more (with our fingers crossed).

I’m not here to judge. This is coming from someone who signed up to gruelling Ironwoman training as if it was your casual yoga class!

But as the great Einstein would say, ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’. Sadly, however, it’s now been confirmed that we must all be a bit Einstein ‘insane’. The latest statistics reported that ‘only 8% of people achieved their resolutions from the year before’ (Statistic Brain, 2017).

With this in mind and 2018 in full-swing, I challenge you to ditch the fast-food approach to making new year resolutions and adopt these four easy goal-setting tactics to reach new year success.

Make time

Dedicate time to planning out your 2018 goals. I’m talking two-plus hours’ worth!

I personally allocate New Year’s Day for writing down my goals for the year. I take a few days to soundboard them with mentors and trusted confidantes and then aim to have them locked down within the week. Spending this time prioritising the key aspects of my life helps me to make sure there is a healthy balance between professional and personal goals and ensuring that as I begin to throw my effort and energy into the year, that it’s directed to the right places. 

Structure

Structuring your goals is a must. A simple ‘lose weight’ goal just won’t cut it. It doesn’t have any specificity to it. There's no target, it’s not time bound and there’s absolutely nothing measurable.

Ensure that you have the ability to track your progress for each new year goal. It’s always easier maintaining momentum when you can track your results. What we measure, gets done. Give yourself a specific goal, and a specific target date.

Audaciously grand

If your goals aren’t audaciously grand then you’re not aiming high enough.

A great mentor of mine once taught me that if you achieve more than 65% of your goals, they’re far too low. That's a pretty realistic reflection on where I landed at the end of 2017. I certainly did not hit anywhere near all of my goals, but I believe that's because I was ambitious enough in terms of their scale. Don’t be afraid to be truly aspirational! It doesn’t mean all your goals need to be supersized but make sure there’s one or two that are really going to push you.

Visualise

Put your goals somewhere you’ll see them every day. This is an incredible underutilised tactic that has an amazingly positive ripple on effect. All too often goals gather digital dust in a Microsoft word document filed somewhere deep in your desktop folders… this doesn’t allow them to be top-of-mind. Seeing goals everyday allows you to have regular accountability and helps you check the progress you’re making towards achieving them.

Personally, I put my goals on my roof above my bed (it’s true… just ask my partner, we’re big believers in ‘roof goals’ in our household) so they’re the last thing I see when I go to sleep and they’re the first thing I see when I wake up. Other ideas are to take a screenshot and use it as the screensaver on your phone or put a print out in your wallet.

What are my 2018 goals you ask? Growing my business overseas, writing my first book, competing in Ironwomans and others that I can’t wait to share with you. All will be revealed in time; so, stay tuned!

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