How To Write A Goal You’ll Actually Stick To

January is a month of new beginnings and many of us have a renewed determination to do our best and achieve the things we really want. And so we think about our dreams, make our New Year’s Resolutions and we begin our journey to greatness.

Right?

Or do we make our resolutions, stick with them for a few weeks or even a few months, only for them to slowly fade away into the back of our minds.

“I’ll start again next week.”

“I was never going to achieve it anyway”

Or, as winter approaches, “I’ll wait until the New Year.”

Some of you may have had these thoughts before when you stopped doing your New Year’s Resolution. I certainly have, especially when I think about restarting towards the end of the year. I will wait until January 1^st to start again. Months wasted. But to me it all made sense because the new year was the perfect time to start again.

But here’s the thing, we can make goals for ourselves whenever we want. We don’t have to wait for the ‘perfect’ moment and we shouldn’t because when is it ever the perfect moment to start losing weight? Or to start learning a new language? There’s always something going on in our lives because, let’s face it, life is busy. And if you’re not careful, life will fly by and before you know it you’ve spent years only thinking about your dream, not doing it.

So let’s make your dream a reality.

Goals

What is a goal? According to the Oxford Leaner’s Dictionary, a goal is:

‘something that you hope to achieve’

When I first read that definition, I was… disheartened. It doesn’t sound very solid or achievable. The word ‘hope’ sounds like the ability to achieve the goal is flimsy and tenuous. “I hope to do this” and “I hope to do that” don’t sound like strong calls to action. I can’t explain why, it is more of a feeling mixed in with my sometimes more pessimistic ways. But that is the wrong way to read this definition because hope is a want that you think is possible.

As long as you think it is possible, you can achieve it.

Choosing A Goal

The MOST important thing is identifying what is important to you.

And that leads us onto the first step: what is your goal? Often, we want to achieve a lot of things, all relating to different areas of our lives. Grab a piece of paper (the prettier the better!) and look at the different areas in our lives below. Choose some areas of your life and down something you would like to achieve in that area. I have included some examples below for each area.

Note: Do not worry about how detailed or specific it is, nor how long it would take to do. Just write what comes to mind.

Once you have some goals written down, read through them again and choose one that is the most important to you. You can come back to the others later.

Now we are going to take this goal and turn it into something more specific and consider how we can go about actually achieving it.

SMART Goals

Having a vague goal is not enough. You must be clear in your intentions to ensure success. The acronym SMART can help with this:

Let’s go through what each of these mean and use the goal of ‘save for a deposit on a house’ as an example.

Specific

Be specific in your goal, for example: how much of a deposit do you want to save? Change the wording of your goal, writing down your more specific goal

E.g. I will save a £50,000 deposit for a house.

Measurable

Attainable

Can you realistically achieve this goal? Does your goal require you to learn new skills or do some research to ensure you are doing the correct thing? Be honest with yourself because if you make a goal that is out of reach, you will be setting yourself up for failure. There is a big difference between a difficult goal and an impossible goal, which I will discuss later.

E.g. How much can you realistically put away each month for a deposit on a house? Are you putting that money into a savings account with the highest interest rate?

Relevant

Is the goal you have picked important to you, is it relevant? Because we started with the previous activity of writing down goals related to different areas of your life, you should have already ticked this box.

Time-Bound

When do you want to have achieved this goal? This ties in with achievability – don’t set the deadline so close that you are unlikely to succeed. But equally, don’t dawdle and give yourself lots of extra time.

For example, your SMART goal:

I will save £50,000 in 8 years for a house deposit, by saving £520 per month.

What If Your Goal Is Difficult?

A difficult goal is a good thing. According to studies, people performed their best and put in the most effort when they had a more difficult goal. Challenges can energise people and as long as the challenge is specific, reducing ambiguity, that energy remains focussed towards a specific goal.

But be wary of making a goal so difficult it becomes impossible. Whilst it is always good to push yourself, doing so falls under your response to working towards a ‘difficult’ goal. Working towards an impossible goal can lead to burnout, stress and even the goal being abandoned. In extreme cases, it can lead to self-hatred because you question why you haven’t achieved an attainable goal, when in actuality  you have misjudged how achievable the goal was.

It is VERY important that you look at how your goal is going to be achieved and assess the steps it is going to take to achieve it. Which leads us on to the next step:

What Do You Need?

Look at your SMART goal and write down the steps needed to achieve it, along with any items you may need e.g. you may need a file and some plastic wallets as part of an accounting goal.

One of the hurdles of goal achievement is having a goal that seems too big, as if there are too many things too do. But when you write what you need to do down, things become a lot more simpler and less overwhelming.

E.g. my SMART goal: I will save £50,000 in 8 years for a house deposit, by saving £520 per month.

Steps to achieve this:

• Do research to find a high interest savings account and open it.
• Set up a direct debit to transfer £520 at the start of every month into a savings account.
• Every 6 months, check my savings account still has a competitive interest rate.

This is a very simple example but can you see how something as big and as life changing as saving for a £50,000 deposit for a house can be broken down into manageable steps? You can do this for all your goals.

So what now?

Now you have worked through this post and you have a SMART goal. Go back to your initial list of goals, from your different life areas, and choose another goal. Work your way through this post again until you have made it a SMART goal, with steps on how to achieve it written underneath. Keep going until you have created all your SMART goals.

Pick one and get started!

Key Things To Remember:

• Every goal should be SMART.
• Every goal should be important to you.
• Your goals can change as your life changes.
  • E.g. had a pay cut? This will affect how much you can save each month for a house deposit. Alter the goal, change the deadline if you need to, otherwise it will be unattainable.
• Write down your WHY.
  • Having a constant reminder as to why you are working towards your goal will help you stay on track.
• A challenging goal is good. An impossible goal is bad.

I hope this post has been useful to you and that you have had fun writing your goals down. Once I have finalised my goals and steps, I like to write them all out again neatly, either on nice paper or in a pretty notebook, with colour pens and highlighters at the ready.

Make it pretty!