Here are Some Tips to Excel Your New Years Goals

5 years ago | Posted in: Articles | 877 Views

The moment of truth comes January 1st for most people: It’s time to put those New Year’s goals into action. The problem is that many people don’t really know how to implement the goals they set for themselves. If you count yourself among those who have lofty New Year’s goals and no concrete ways to make your goals happen, take heart. Achieving your goals can be simpler than you think. Here are three tips to help you push yourself to achieve your goals.

1. Be S.M.A.R.T. About Your Goals

According to the MIT website, the simplest way to make sure that you achieve your goals is to set S.M.A.R.T. goals.

S.M.A.R.T. stands for:

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Attainable
  • Relevant
  • Time-Bound

Basically, you want to make your goals concrete – “I want to have a million dollars in my bank account by the time I retire.” versus “I want to retire rich.”

Further, you must be able to both measure the goal and believe you can attain it. In this case, a bank account with a million dollars in it is something you can measure, and this goal can be attainable over a 20- or 30-year career span.

It becomes a relevant goal if it’s part of your larger financial health goals. You add a time-bound element if you say something like, “I’d like to retire by the time I’m 59 years old and have a million dollars in my bank account.”

2. One Thing at a Time

APA.org suggests that people break their goals up into smaller chunks. As the site explains, the bad habits we all have developed over a long period of time. New ones will also develop over a period of time, too.

That being the case, it’s best to choose just one thing you want to change on your New Year’s goals and start working on that. For example, let’s say that you have decided that your primary goal right now is to improve the onboarding process for your new employees.

Once you know that, you can put all other goals on the back burner for now and concentrate on onboarding. Maybe that means you’ll have a dedicated person to onboard all new employees. Or maybe it means going to seminars to learn how the pros in your industry onboard new employees. Then, implement whatever you have determined will help you most efficiently help your new employees and do so without guilt.

Practice the implementation of that goal until it is a habit. Then you can move onto your next goals.

3. Decide With Deliberation

This is related the advice in the previous section. When you are trying to decide which New Year’s goals to implement, it can feel tempting to try to change your life all at once. However, Psych Central cautions people not to do that. Instead, it’s better to choose the one goal that will have the most impact on all of your other goals.

That is to say, you need to choose which goal you’ll try to accomplish first and based on how that goal will impact your other goals. You must choose that goal with deliberation.

In the case of the onboarding goal, perhaps you’ve chosen that one because you know you’re going to hire a lot of new employees in order to take your business to the next level. Concentrating on onboarding means that all new employees will be trained up quickly and ready to really hit the ground running.

This, in turn, means that your business can hit its major goals because you will have the employees necessary to accomplish those goals. (And these employees will be properly trained and will be able to do their jobs.)

You should approach all of your goals in this way: What goal, if accomplished, will make the accomplishment of all of your other goals easier? Once you decide that, it’ll be easier to tackle your New Year’s goals.

Concluding Thoughts

Accomplishing your New Year’s goals means that your life could change for the better, whether it be improving something at work or losing that extra weight you’ve been carrying around. However, in order to achieve those goals, you’ll want to take a couple of steps.

First, you’ll want to implement the S.M.A.R.T. goals principle. Next, you’ll want to tackle only one goal at a time. Finally, you must commit to choosing the best goal to tackle first: You must be deliberate in choosing which goal you’ll tackle first. If you do this, the accomplishments of all of your other goals will much easier in the long run.

Jeremy is a tech and business writer from Simi Valley, CA. He’s worked for Adobe, Google, and himself. He lives for success stories, and hopes to be one someday.hat it brings to your business as a whole.

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