Personal Development: Still Hope For 2020 Goals

By
Paul Morris
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906

Reetika Gupta-Chaudhary offers her take on resurrecting those forgotten goals and resolutions.

I find the transition from December into January quite extreme. December is the month of celebrations and festivities dotted with Christmas, travel, gifts, all leading up to an exhilarating new year bash. January on the other hand, is a bit of a drag.

There is a universal feeling of ‘post event blues’ – our massive new year’s resolutions and goals only worsen this feeling of world weariness. We spend the first half of January settling back into a routine, and the rest of it is spent feeling guilty because we could not even begin to think about the big goals and promises we made to ourselves at the start of the new year, let alone live up to them.

Good news! It’s not all over, how about making a fresh start from the month of February? Remember, we still have 48 weeks/235 days left of this year to achieve our goals; in other words, we still have 235 more opportunities to achieve the goals that we set for this year.
Goal setting or ‘new year resolutions’ as we may like to call them are meant to inspire us to act. For some, it could be losing weight, for others achieving sales targets, for others it could be finding an ideal partner. Just because January wasn’t the most ideal start, by no means does it imply that the rest of the year is going to be equally disappointing.

Let’s get back on track: In my work as a coach and helping clients achieve their goals, I have managed to condense all my experience and learning thus far into the following steps. By following these steps, I assure you that you will see your goals coming to life:

1. Make it easy for your mind to accept: We generally set goals for the whole of next year and, contrary to the common belief, this is not always helpful. The fact that we have set the goal for the entire year means that subconsciously we believe that we still have a lot of time to complete our tasks, and the sheer endlessness of the time limit makes it cumbersome. The solution to this is breaking down the one-year goal into a monthly goal and further into weekly targets.

Let’s take a simple example of losing weight. If you say that you have to lose 20 kilos in the next year, how does that sound to you? Yes, maybe after a couple of drinks on the Christmas party you may say it’s definitely possible, but as soon as the hangover calms down and fear takes over, you ask: ‘20 kilos! How on earth am I going to do that?’ And then you go back into the ‘Oh it’s not new year yet’ mode with a feeling of ‘eat whatever I can before I kill myself with dieting next year’. And then next year, other things take over and it never happens. However, if you break 20 kilos into 12 months, it’s only 1.66 kilos per month. Does that seem achievable? Let’s break it down a bit more: it’s only half a kilo in a week.

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