New Year’s Day is traditionally a time for new beginnings, resolutions and goal setting.  It can be an exciting opportunity for making positive change.  It can also be a time of reflecting on past resolutions that have not worked out.  The flip side of an exciting opportunity is fearing failure.  We often fail at our goals because we don’t have good goals to begin with.  To succeed in making positive change we need specific and achievable goals and a plan to achieve them.  Attitude also makes a huge difference.  When we judge our success strictly as pass/fail we can easily become discouraged by a bad day, a bad week, or even a one moment of weakness.  It is much more encouraging to identify and celebrate progress as you go.  All progress is progress.

Write SMART goals.  Yes, you have to write them out.

SMART: Goals should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time Bound.

Specific – A clear and well defined goal provides direction and provides you with the ability to identify when you have achieved it.  It is important and helpful to write down your goal because it makes it real.  Making the effort to write it down indicates to yourself that you mean it.  Writing also helps to make it more specific as you choose your words to write it down.  When it is written down you can refer back to it to see what your goal was.  It is more motivating when a goal is written in positive terms: “eat vegetables daily” as opposed to “eat less cake”; “work out 3 times a week” as opposed to “don’t be a couch potato.”

Measurable – There must be something to count for a goal to be measurable.  This allows you to identify when you are making progress and compare with where you were when you started.  It is fine to have a big goal, but then it is also helpful to write short term goals or process goals – these are the steps you need to take on your way to achieving a larger goal.  If one wants to lose 30 pounds that is a measurable goal, but one that is going to take some steps to achieve.  Writing a goal for the first 5 pounds gives you a stepping stone to that larger goal.  Writing a goal to exercise three times a week and to not eat fast food, eat vegetables daily, and make more meals at home than one is currently doing are all measurable process goals that will provide motivation on the way to the larger goal.

Attainable – Make goals something that you are likely to be able to accomplish.  Otherwise, goals end up being self-defeating and discouraging, even demoralizing.  Often, when one has thoughts like “I never accomplish my goals,” they are beating themselves up and attributing past failures to personal short comings when in reality they just never learned to write useful goals.  This is more reason to write short term goals toward reaching your larger goal, to provide more manageable goals and encouragement on the way to your larger goal.

Relevant – Make your goals relevant to your needs, desires and values.  This helps you make progress in your life and ensures that you have real motivation to work toward these goals.  If you are not really motivated and ready to work toward a goal then you will not be successful.  If you are making a goal because others say you should do it but it isn’t really important to you, then you are less likely to be successful.

Time Bound – Goals should have a deadline to motivate you to work to achieve them.  A deadline sets a sense of urgency to get started and work toward your goal.  Without a deadline it is easy to procrastinate.  A deadline also builds in a time to evaluate and celebrate progress and evaluate and adjust goals.  When a deadline comes and a goal has not been met is a critical time where it is easy to get discouraged, but is a good opportunity to fine-tune your goals and planning.  If a goal has not yet been met it can mean that the goal wasn’t specific enough, was too ambitious or more work needs to be put into planning HOW to achieve the goal.

This is also a good time to identify and celebrate progress toward your goal, even if you didn’t achieve it.  If your goal was to lose 10 pounds by this date and you only lost 8 you have 8 pounds to celebrate!  If you didn’t lose any weight but you’ve made some healthy changes to your diet you have still done something positive for yourself that you can celebrate.  Make an effort to find positives to motivate yourself to keep trying.  Did you work toward your goal for a month then lose motivation?  Great job on working toward your goal for a month!  How did you feel about that month?  Just making a goal is a small step toward that goal.  Every time we set a goal we are making an effort to change behaviors in our life, which is a hard thing to do.  Just making the effort is a step toward change.   All progress is progress.