How to acheive your 2025 new years resolutions
If you’re like me, you began the new year by setting some “resolutions” for yourself, a practice that many enjoy and fewer ever follow through with in their day to day lives. So today, I want to examine what makes the difference between setting endless goals and targets for yourself and achieving them in your life. Most importantly, when it comes to setting goals for yourself, you need to link actions to measurable outcomes and have a plan to follow through with them.
SMART Goals.
This is a bit of a business buzzword which normally I try to avoid, but it is that way for a reason and it really stuck with me and made a difference in my life so I want to share it with you today. In this case SMART is both an acronym and a one word description of what goals made with this system are like. For those unfamiliar, Smart goals are:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
So, what does that mean for your new years resolution? Well, let’s have a look at a typical new years resolution and see how we can make the goal SMARTer and as a result make ourselves much more likely to achieve it. Let’s say that my new years resolution is “I will lose weight”, this is a laudable goal and one many of us can relate to, but it misses the mark since it has no specific measurable outcome, we cannot tell if it is achievable, and there is no time allotted to completing this goal. As a result, it’s likely that a vague and ill defined goal like this one will never be achieved and another year will go by and I’ll be just as pudgy and unhealthy as I was the year before.
So let’s re-write this goal as a SMART goal, and see how this can really change our outlook on it, and make us much more likely to actually achieve our stated goal in the end. The SMART version of this goal might look something like this “I will lose 10kg by August this year, which I will achieve by going to the gym a minimum of 3 days each week for 1 hour each session, and I will monitor and record my progress each week”. See how this goal is much more precise, and refers to the method we would use to achieve the goal.
To really ensure that we succeed in our weight loss journey though, a goal like this is not enough, Ideally we would like to split this 8-month task in to smaller bite-sized goals that can be achieved more frequently, and succeeding in these smaller goals will motivate and push us forward to achieve the larger goals. So for example, maybe we want to ease ourselves in to our exercise and diet journey and we set multiple goals for January like
1. I will research pricing and join a local gym by the 10th of January.
2. In January I will go to the gym 6 times after joining.
3. I will keep a food diary for the month of January, and consider how to improve my diet before February.
By doing this, we can massively improve our chances of succeeding with our overall goal of losing weight in 2025, by breaking it down in to specific, measurable and achievable portions, and using these smaller successes to motivate ourselves forward as we achieve our sub-goals and eventually our greater goal. Once you've knocked your smaller goals out of the way for January, you'll be ready to set new bite-size goals for Feb and onwards and ultimately acheive what you want to in 2025.
If you are want to hear more tips and tricks for goal setting and how to succeed in the Australian tech sector join our next webinar in the career toolkit webinar series on the 28th of January with Gabriela Guiu-Sorsa, Goal setting for success. Gabriela will share some of her tips for goal setting for success and improvement in the tech industry, and share her insights as a cyber-security advisor for you to benefit from.