Setting Goals for the New Year

Hello, Lovely Community! I hope everyone is doing well.

Today is the Day 3 of our New Goals, New Beginning Event. (The master post for the event is given here )

This is the time of year where the popular tradition of choosing a New Year's resolution is embraced by people in many parts of the world. This tradition aims to encourage us to grow ourselves with the beginning of a new year. Unfortunately, many of us may start our New Year's resolution and never stick to it, due to various reasons like lack of motivation/clarity/seriousness, confusion on how to proceed and so on.

Have you ever wondered why resolutions often may not work? Maybe the answer is in the name itself. A resolution is a firm determination to do something and requires the motivation to make a serious change in one's life or lifestyle. (And this level of serious motivation doesn't suddenly occur just because it's the first of January of a new year *sigh*). Let's start with something simple and more practical - Goals.

2021 is almost here and it's time to start setting goals for the new year.

Firstly, let's understand why are goals important?

The simple answer would be - Life is a bit easier and enjoyable if we have some clarity on what we want to accomplish and which direction we need to take. Our simple daily problems, or harsh struggles become more meaningful when we are not blind and have something to look forward to. Goals put the challenges into perspective and gives us motivation to create our own meaning of our life.

How should we keep our goals?

Here are some things we need to consider while choosing our goals:

Our first priority is always our Health
(Mental, physical, emotional) Having health related goals is the most important as you will be able to work on other aspects of your life only if you are able to manage and take care of your own health. Health is the greatest wealth!

Determine what kind of person you want to be.
This can be done by considering how we want to treat the people important to us and how we want them to remember us.

Having meaningful reasons for your personal/career/or any goal.
We need to come up with some meaningful reasons behind wanting to achieve our goals. Why are these goals so important for us to achieve? and how can our life improve?

Determining the emotions we would feel if we fail to achieve our goals.
This can help us in realizing the importance of these goals and their impact on our life. This can be a good motivator to work hard on our goals

Keeping S.M.A.R.T Milestones
S.M.A.R.T ( Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely ) milestones are important to check our progress and encourage ourselves to work each day.

How to stick to our goals?

Goals are promises to make improvements in ourselves for our own growth. So, in order to stick to these promises we need to:

1. Set ourselves up for growth

This can be done by keeping regular reminders of what we want to accomplish and why?

2. Being mindful about the number of goals

Having too many goals can be overwhelming. The number of goals we want to have depends on our current life situations, how much free time we are willing to commit, and so on. But, as a rule of thumb some experts suggest that having 3-5 achievable goals is a good number.

3. Keeping regular Milestones

These are small tasks to accomplish within a goal that shows some progress. These milestones are suggested to be time based and outcome based.

4. Reviewing our Milestones/Goals

Reviewing our goals Weekly/Monthly & Yearly helps to assess our progress, and change or adjust our priorities according to our current needs. We don't have to punish ourselves if we don't accomplish something as decided before, instead it's more important to figure out what went wrong or what came in our way and set another deadline which seems more practical and realistic to accomplish the goal. The more we review, the more we learn to set practical milestones or goals for ourselves.

5. Rewarding ourselves for each Milestone or Goal

It requires a lot of effort to work on each and every task. It's important to celebrate each and every win, no matter whether it is big or small. Celebrating our own achievement will give us confidence, motivation and a sense of meaning to move forward in our journey to accomplish what we want from our life.

Here are some questions for all of you to answer:

What did you wish to do this year (2020), do you still want to do or achieve those same things in 2021?

Are there things you were putting off which demands attention in the coming year? or What are you looking forward to accomplish in 2021?

Let us know below in this thread!

Also please fill out this form after participating in the to claim your December Event badge. (Only 1 entry per person)

Check out this Masterpost by Tazzie to participate in other fun December Event activities by different communities.

Sending warm New Year best wishes to everyone. I hope 2021 will be a stellar year filled with growth, love and blessings!

Refereces: https://www.angstrom.life/goals

>> Click Here for the Day 4 event post.