Most New Year’s resolution fails by mid-January. Instead of publishing mine at the beginning of the month and perhaps falling into the same trap I decide to hold on and see what happens. There are all sorts of theories about goal setting but the two nearly opposite ones are here below:
- Some insist goals should be challenging, nearly unrealistic, in order to stretch boundaries and one’s comfort zone. I would push a client in that direction if I know I can work with her on a regular basis and keep her accountable, reward her when she progresses and support her on the down phases. For certain people when the goal is perceived to be out of reach they would not try to achieve it.
- Others insist goals should be dead easy so the person achieving them would rewarded. In my opinion and experience when a goal is too easy to achieve there is less incentive to do anything about it. Also the reward is often not that remarkable, hence less incentive to set more goals.
When in the process of setting New Year’s resolution goals for myself I tried to be honest and realistic about what I could achieve while feeling challenged. Considering I am running a few businesses, I practice sport 6-10 hours per week and I follow a decent diet most of the time I wanted to set goals in areas which are usually left behind in my busy life. My three main goals are:
- Meditate, for at least 15 minutes, daily
- Write a blog post every working day, on one of the 4 blogs I am managing: gaet.org (this one), www.martialwhat.com, www.carisma.org.uk and www.salus-wellness.com
- Walk at least 30 Km per month
I accepted that, occasionally, things might not go as expected but simply ignore the odd chance and go on business as usual.
As today it’s the end of the month I can state that:
- I managed to meditate all days but two days
- I wrote 14 blog posts (including this one) out of 21 working days
- I walked 40.44 Km (among the monitored walks I did)
So I am happy of the overall results as, despite not perfect and with room for improvement, I have achieved satisfactory results.