About two weeks ago a new year began and that means for many of us it was time to set goals! Most people love to set goals, but when it comes to reaching those goals we start to struggle. But this year we will do better and I will help you! In the following post I will give you some tipps on how to set your goals and stay motivated to work towards your goals.
The following tipps have worked for me very good, but of course we all have different personalities, goals and lives, so different things might work for us. But it is never wrong to give it a try and see if it works for you, too 🙂
Define Your Goals
Of course the first step is to think about your personal goals. A new habit, a new training goal, a new pole dance move you want to learn – think about what you want to improve. Try to really think about what YOU want, not what others would like, what sounds impressive or what seems to be good in general. Try to find your personal goals.
Try to find YOUR PERSONAL goals!
Make sure to not choose too many at the same time, otherwise it will be too hard to focus on all of them. Don´t pick more than five goals to start with. You can get back to the other ones as soon as you reached one of your goals or if you feel like you need some new objectives.
Once you picked your personal goals make sure to really think about them and try to define them more detailed. For example if you decided to live more healthy, think about what this means to you. Do you want to do more sports? Eat healthier? Write it down and be as precise as possible with every single goal! This step is really important, so take your time for it.
Be as PRECISE as possibe!
Also make sure that your goals are not too difficut to reach. For example I want to eat healthier again, but I know I won´t manage to do it perfectly right away and if I am too strict I won´t manage to stick to it. So I just decided that I will eat a healthy breakfast with fruits for breakfast and lots of fresh veggies with each lunch. So I can still eat pasta, cake and sweets if I want, but with all the fresh healthy foods I still get more vitamins and I know that my gravings for unhealthy stuff will become a little less.
On the other hand a goal which is too easy is boring and therefore also not really motivating. Your goals should be a litte challenge for you, but reachable. Be honest with yourself at this point 😉
Make A Plan
Once you chose and defined your goals, it is time to think about how you can reach them. For example I want to learn contortion push ups this year. I decided to work daily on it, but with different exercises and only a few repetitions, so I can fit it in my day whenever I want. The exercieses I chose are the following: full movement together with a spotter, handstand push ups, lowering from handstand to cheststand, practice my balance in a contortion handstand or do push ups starting with my chest on the ground and hands elevated. I make sure to do at least one of those exercices each day. Try to make your own plan for your goal, too.
If you chose a new habit – for example do a 10min yoga routine every morning – you might not need a plan, as just doing the new habit is your plan 😉 But instead you could maybe think about how you will incooperate the new habit in your daily life (every morning after breakfast? Right after getting up?) or what you need for it (a new yoga mat? New workout clothes?).
Incooperate it in your daily life!
Visualize Your Goals
This step is not neccessary but it will help you to not forget about your goals even during stressful and busy times. There are lots of different ways. I will first let you know what I did and then give you some more ideas. After you have set your goals with the tipps above it is now time to start working on your goals and especially to stay motivated!
Habit Tracker
I love habit trackers, I have them in my Bullet Journal. There are different designs, the one above is a very classical one which I prefer. You can either have one big habit tracker for all your goals or have seperate mini habit trackers for each goal. On top you write down the days and then colour the boxes (or just make a cross or whatever you prefer) when you did your habit, exercices or whatever you are tracking
I always do this in the evening but you can also do it right after you did one of your new habits.
Goal Poster
You can also create a little poster where you write down your goals in big colorful letters or even draw something if you prefer it more artistic. Be creative 😉 Just make sure you won´t miss it by making it not too small and of course you should place it somewhere where you can see it daily. Good places are for example your fridge or above your desk.
Post its
Another great way and alternative to a habit tracker is to use post-its. If you for example chose to stretch daily for 30 days you write the numbers 1 to 30 on 30 post-its. Now place them all on a place where you can see them. As it is maybe not as pretty as your goal poster your wardrope would be maybe a good place. Every day you can pull off one of the post-its – but of course only if you did your new habit 😉
More Tipps
Sometimes it is good to share your goals with others. It can be enough to just talk about it to a good friend, it will motivate you to know that others know about your goals! Or maybe you can even work together with a friend on one of your goals.
It can also help to seperate big goals in little steps. For example if you dream of doing 30 push ups start smaller: 10 push ups till the end of january, 15 till end of february and so on. You get the idea. Smaller steps are easier to reach and therefore you don´t get frustrated to easy.
For some people it is also helpful to set a deadline for the goal. I prefer to keep that open and just see how long my body needs to learn something new without pressure. But of course a little bit of pressure can make you work harder on your goals.
Summary
1. Set challenging but reachable goals.
2. Define your goals as datailed as possible.
3. Decide how you can reach each of your goals.
4. Vizualize your goals with a habit tracker or goal-poster.
I hope at least some of the tipps will help you to reach your goals! If you need help with one of the steps, leave me a comment and I will see if I can help you. You can also just live me a comment with your current goals, I think it is always very inspiring and interesting to read about the goals of others! Before you get started now, keep in mind that it is also totally okay if you don´t reach all of your goals – it doesn´t mean that you were not good enough, maybe they just didn´t really fit to you.
xx
Julia