What Happened to My New Year’s Resolutions? – Reaching Your Goals by Taking Small Steps

New Year's Resolutions

What has happened to my New Year’s resolutions you ask yourself not long after you have made them. It’s only a matter of weeks before those grand ideas have wafted away like the morning mist not to be seen again for another year, if ever.

When you made them they seemed like they would be so easy to achieve. You were going to go to the gym three times a week. That was an easy goal to set. You were going to drink less and smoke less, maybe even give up smoking. That seemed reasonable at the time.

Arriving at work on time every day was definitely possible. That is, until they started working on the roads and all the traffic ground to a halt in the mornings. After all, that couldn’t be your fault could it? Phoning your parents once a week was on that list. So was signing up for a new course to help your career along.

By February, those New Year’s resolutions had evaporated and you felt guilty that they didn’t at least last until mid-year. It seemed that every year those goals set at the beginning of January have a shorter life-time.

What stops you from keeping those promises you make to yourself? What stops you from making those changes that could enrich your life? Why do you hang onto those old habits for dear life, never wanting to let them go?

Setting goals and achieving them is one of the most difficult things to do. Countless self-help books are available in shops and online stores. The proliferation of eBooks on the topic shows that there are many people who want to learn the secret to setting and reaching goals.

The biggest secret, and one that is seldom discussed, is that goals need to be broken down into small achievable steps. It is the idea of one enormous goal that often puts people off and stops them from even trying. It’s like planning to climb Mt Everest but you haven’t even tried to climb the local hill.

That’s how our goal setting fails us. We set our goals to be so large we fail to achieve them because we lose courage. We need to lose weight? We don’t set any milestones to reach our goal. We want to immediately get rid of all the excess weight at once. The fact that it might have taken ten years for the weight to creep up on us is forgotten. We want to get rid of it in a month. And, when that doesn’t happen, we give up.

We want to go back to College or the University to get a degree to help with our career and we give up after a few months. It wasn’t supposed to take that long and be so much work.

As long as you keep your eye on the goal, you will manage to get there by using small steps.

Break up your goals into small bite-sized pieces. Make them smaller and easier to achieve. Being able to easily attain many small successes will more easily encourage you to keep going to reach the bigger goal at the end of the road.

If you want to check out a Free, simple, online system that I use to help me set and achieve my goals, click here.