Reset Your Personal Goals
You can increase your chances of success if you reset your personal goals from last year’s resolutions. Do you know how?
Millions of us face a reality at the start of each calendar year. Despite our best intentions and a great plan, we didn’t meet our goals from the previous year’s resolutions.
On average, only 9 – 12% of us keep our new year’s resolutions. In fact, 25% fail in the first week! However, after six months, 46% are still at it. Compare that to only 4% of people with similar aspirations who didn’t set a goal and will be working on their resolutions six months later. In order words, our chances are better if we make a new year’s resolution. (Wiley Online Library; Journal of Clinical Psychology)
Why are New Year’s resolutions important?
The new year is like a new opportunity to get things in order. Setting new year’s resolutions allows us to hit the reset button and start over with desired changes. This is important for many reasons:
- Setting new year’s expectations gives us a goal or something to aspire to.
- We perform better when we have goals to achieve
- It encourages us to stop, reflect on the past, and apply lessons learned to the future.
Resetting New Year’s Goals
Every year, millions of us declare failure to our past year’s resolutions. It’s most often because we did not achieve success based on the standard we set or adopt. However, there’re times when we declare failure when we really did not fail at all.
Reset your definition of success. In Matt 14:28-31, my friend Peter the disciple set out to walk on water to meet Jesus. While he did not reach Jesus (his goal) but started to sink from distractions, he DID WALK on water (success)!
How to Reset Your Resolutions
- Realize the battlefield is your mind. Stop listening to your internal doubts. You may have experienced a temporary pause, but there is victory in the journey. Partial success does not mean failure; even if all you did was write out your plan. You achieved some success by developing the plan!
- Reevaluate last year’s goals and make adjustments. Remember, your past was a guidepost. Not a hitching post. Don’t get stuck on what didn’t work.
- Reset your expectations and standards. Don’t allow social media, which is full of the perfect photos, to define success for you. There, failure tends to be invisible, while success is widely celebrated.
- Refocus on what’s important, the need for the change, and the plan to get there. Start with our discussion on 5 Steps to Master Personal Goals.
Success is a journey. Not a destination.
- Renew your commitment and take the first step to progress. Don’t wait till you are “perfectly ready.” Even if it does not look encouraging, take the first step.
- Revive your resilience. Don’t let your faith fail. Know that it will be difficult. No matter how much you stumble, your faith will bring you through. You can’t succeed if you quit.
- Relentlessly pursue your goal. That happens when your need and faith come together. You have to “need” to make a change more than you “want” to. And it’s ok to feel like quitting. Your response is the key.
- Recognize and celebrate every small win. Every milestone is a celebratory point. God will get the glory from your testimony of staying with it, persevering through it, and not quitting.
Everyone would be successful if achieving new year’s resolutions was easy. Any small step we take forward is an improvement. If we missed our goals last year, remember that victory only comes to those who hit the reset button and rise again.
Empowered Leader Reflection
How would you benefit from resetting your delayed resolutions from last year?
