Here’s the real reason why you aren’t keeping your New Year’s resolutions

 

Did you know that 80% of people ‘fail’ to achieve their New Year’s resolutions? Be it at home or at work, most lose their motivation and intention by mid February.

If you are one of them, keep reading to find out what could be holding you back.

 

Setting resolutions or goals can help you stay focused, driven and increase your performance, especially at work. There are many reasons why you might not achieve your goals. You get caught up in life, lose our focus, get distracted… But maybe the *real* reason is that you didn’t set the right goals in the first place. Do you know WHY you set up these goals? Most people find it difficult to really know why they are setting the goals and what they want to achieve.

 

To ensure you nail your goal setting, and stick with them through 2020, you need to know yourself. How can you know what you want if we don’t know who you are?

To know yourself, your two best allies are self-awareness and emotional intelligence.

 

Self-awareness

It will give you clarity on who you are. It will drive you to know what you want and why you want to achieve your goals. It will also help you define your purpose, help you recognise any barriers that arise, why you want to set these specific goals you have in mind and the meaning they will have for you.

 

Emotional intelligence

It will help you recognise and understand your emotions and how to manage them. This is a great skill if you ever get caught up in self-doubt and criticism, self-sabotage, fear of failure, anxiety and stress. It can even help you turn these emotions into advantages!

“What really matters for success, character, happiness and lifelong achievements is a definite set of emotional skills – your EQ — not just purely cognitive abilities that are measured by conventional IQ tests.”  — Daniel Goleman

If you want to give your performance a boost, invest in building your self-awareness and your emotional intelligence. Counselling and therapy are effective and powerful tools to help you.

 

So to set your goals properly, you need to know what makes you happy, what drives you, what excites you. Here are 5 tips to get you started.

 

1- Stay clear from ‘musterbation’

Don’t use words like ‘must’, ‘cannot’ or ‘should’. In psychology, this is called ‘musterbation’. By using these words, you are unconsciously restricting and limiting yourself.

 

2- Figure out your intentions and motivations

One of my intentions for 2020 is to have an online course in the first six months of the year. My intention is ‘Online course by June 2020’.  My motivation is my WHY.  It answers ‘why do I want to do an online course?’. Some of my answers are: To compliment the services I have now/To build on our training/To make our training more accessible. It’s important to have clarity on both your intention and your motivation.

 

3 – Keep your mindset healthy

If you were your own coach/mentor, what three sentences would you say to yourself every day? Have you tried re-framing your thoughts and getting them focused? Take a look at our last blog about our powerful SOS positive thinking exercise. 

 

4- Write your goals down

Tell people about them, shout them at the top of a Munro, or at the back of a pub! Buy yourself a journal and write them down make them specific, explicit and time bound.  This makes them more concrete and will keep you focused, as long as you keep coming back to them regularly whether that’s each day, each week and each month.

 

5- Get help

If you keep coming up against obstacles, feel like you are lacking clarity, your motivation and focus reduces and what you want, working with a goal focused therapist can make a real difference. A professional will help you get to know yourself better and explore your possibilities. If you’re unsure of what a therapist can offer you, don’t hesitate to contact me for a free advice consultation.

 

“It is no exaggeration to say that working with Angie has been absolutely life changing”. Therapy client.

 

 

If you are tired of setting goals for the sake of it, because everyone else is doing it or because of other’s expectations, it’s time to delve deeper into who you really are and what you really want. If you would like help to investigate your intentions and motivations, so you can set goals and reach the best version of yourself, click here to find out how our therapists could support you.