New Year’s Resolutions made practical: Overcome two destructive approaches.

In this blogpost you will:

• Discover two destructive approaches to goal setting.

• Find ways to overcome and manage these approaches.
  

In our series about new year’s resolutions, we have focused on habits and practices that will help you be clear, focused and stay motivated. This week we will be looking at two approaches people take which leave them discouraged and overwhelmed and give you practical tips to manage them. I am referring to the ‘all or nothing’ approach and the ‘more is better’ approach.

All or nothing approach:

This approach rears its ugly head when starting out our goals. We compare ourselves to others who have attempted a similar goal as well as forgetting that we have lives full of activity and responsibilities. This happens because we look at goals or lifestyle changes in isolation not keeping the rest of our lives and humanness in mind.  We set goals that would need to consume our lives to accomplish and then are surprised when we cannot keep up with the goal.

I want to encourage you to consider scaling your goal, or lifestyle change back to whatever can fit your manageable free time.

If that means ten minutes a day, then focus on setting your goal within that framework. You want to set yourself up for success not disappointment and regret. An example of this would be from my own life. I would like to read more consistently, I then looked at my life and came up with a manageable 10minutes reading a day. It does not have to stay to ten minutes, but you only commit to ten minutes a day. This is much more manageable than setting my goal at a x number of books for the year.

More is better approach:

This approach wants you to believe that setting twenty goals and five lifestyle changes all a once is a good idea only to leave you daydreaming of what could have been and comforting yourself that there is always next year, that never comes. Like the ‘all or nothing’ approach this approach refers to taking on too much without considering your current reality. The truth about goals and lifestyle changes are that we are limited to the amount that we can handle. I always ask my coaching clients the following “out of the three top goals that you set for yourself, which goal is most important to you right now?” Or to put it another way, “if you could only accomplish one goal this year what would it be?” These questions will help you marry the dream and the reality. I am not saying to only have one goal for the year, I am pointing out that when you prioritize and focus your capacity, you are much more likely to succeed.

You would have probably noticed that these two approaches are linked in that they require more than we can give, overestimating what it would take to accomplish the goals we set. If we are not careful, we can get to a place of shying away from setting any goals, drifting along in life reacting to whatever comes our way.

We want to be intentional about our lives and live life to the fullest, intentionally using the potential that God has entrusted to us, let's start by setting manageable goals.

Coach U

Think about the two approaches mentioned above, how can you apply the tips gives in each of the approaches to become more sustainable in reaching your goals while coping with daily realities.

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