Wondering Why Your Goals Aren’t Happening? Use this Checklist.
What is it you're not doing when setting your yearly resolution that is costing you a beautiful life of your design?
Many of us know what we need to do, but yet we fail. Why?
Whenever we are serious about doing something, we spend days preparing for it, be it a wedding, a holiday, or a cool idea. Yet setting resolutions over a day of excited energy is setting yourself up for failure.
I'm sharing this post in November so you have a month of preparation time before we go into the new year. Use December for clearing the yard to sow the seeds on the right foundation. Live with the goals for a month before you actually set them for real.
Having guided so many people with achieving their goals over the last 7 years, I have a few rules:
1) Lean into it
Just like you’d enjoy a free trial period before you buy anything, before you set any long term goal, try it out first!
This will help you learn your points of failing in advance. Because more than the goal itself, it's important to know what's going to come in your way while you’re pursuing it.
For example, one year when I planned to turn veg the following year, I went veg for a week before New Year’s to learn what will and will not work for me.
2) Make the goal keeping you and your lifestyle in mind
Using the same example, I had decided that when I travel I will be non veg, while the 300 days I spent in Chennai I'd be veg.
The funny part is if I said I'll be veg Tuesdays and Thursdays, that would’ve seemed more acceptable to the mind versus inside Chennai and outside Chennai. This is because no one does it that way, and our mind loves to judge anything that doesn’t seem normal.
The point is, you must make decisions not for others to praise and understand you, but decisions that excite you, that suit you.
3) Don’t set up your goals to start on the same day
The first of January is a very attractive date. But I would like you to look at will power as a muscle…build it up slowly and steadily.
For example only (I'm not in anyway a health expert):
Start with cutting out sugar, and in 2 weeks graduate to adding brown rice. At the next level give up gluten, and so on. Over a period of time you should have earned your way into your goals. Otherwise we tend to fall flat by January 7th and lament that resolutions don't work.