Practice, Practice, Practice

Practice makes perfect. Even if you slip up and don’t stick to your goal 100%, keep going and work on it every single day. Practice making smart choices. For example, if you’re working on a health-related goal, cook some healthy food. Go for a walk on your lunch break and try to cut back on the amount of cigarettes you smoke. Cut back on the lunches you eat out and try to do something free on the weekend if living more frugally is your goal. Keep practicing and you’ll start to get into the habit of doing things the new way.

Make It Easy to Form the New Habits

You also want to make it as easy as possible to stick to your new habits. If you’re trying to eat healthier, keep some of less-healthy foods that you find yourself tempted to binge out of the house (or buy them in smaller quantities or split that package of chips, cookies, candy, etc. with a family member or friend and give them half to take home). If you’re trying to improve your fitness or strength, keep a bag with workout clothes in your car and your sneakers by the door. If you want to pay off your credit cards and avoid charging anything else on them, freeze the cards (literally—some friends I know have frozen their credit card in a block of ice in the freezer so that they can access the card if a true emergency comes up but they’ve created a barrier that helps keep them from turning to the card for impulse purchases). Do what you can to remove temptations to slip back into old “bad” habits.

Catch Yourself Early When You Slip Back into Your Old Ways

Pay attention to your behavior and start to recognize when, how and under what circumstances you’re most likely to slip back into your old habits. Keeping a journal may help you do that. (I wrote a little about journaling as a tool for self-accountability last week and will share more about the benefits of journaling in an upcoming blog series!)

Often, just being aware of the things that tempt us to stray from our goals will help muster the willpower to stop it. It can also be helpful to replace old rituals with new ones. Replace that bowl of ice cream or bag of chips you’d munch on at night with a cup of herbal tea.  If you have a fitness goal, replace some of your TV-watching time with a workout (or multitask and do some at-home workouts while watching your favorite show.) Or if, for example, you have an entrepreneurship-related goal, spend some time at the end of your day doing one thing related to your business aspirations.  It doesn’t have to be big or time-consuming—in other words, you don’t have to write your whole business plan in one night after you’re already tapped out at the end of your regular work day!—it can be as simple and as fun as browsing social media and websites of your prospective competitors or of entrepreneurs you admire to get a sense of the market or find some inspiration.  Make working toward your goal part of your new evening or daily ritual and keep creating new habits that you can stick with for life!

Recommitting

Having said all of the above—sometimes we’re following all the “right” steps to stay motivated and accountable and just need an extra boost or a bigger, bolder push to recommit yourself to your goals and stay on track. May is National Recommitment Month and in next month’s blog series, Flourishing Fiercely will be diving into why we need to recommit sometimes and how we can re-energize ourselves when life gets in the way. I’m posting today from beautiful Miami where I’ve been attending a conference for work, and the colorful plants, sun, and warm air have been just what I needed to give myself a mental pick-me-up (spring flowers and temperatures are still slowly making their way to my hometown of Chicago!) I even rented a bicycle and took time during a conference break to get outside and explore a local park and bike path. One thing to know about me is that back home, I am not a regular cyclist, or a very confident one, so my two-wheel exploring definitely required me to step out of my comfort zone–and it felt great! As we close out the month of April, I hope I’ve helped inspire you to set some SMART goals and make a plan to reach them. And I encourage you to do something to step out of your comfort zone and energize yourself for your path ahead!

You set a goal and you’ve been doing well. Then you get to the point where it would be just a little too easy to backtrack or give up on your goal. You’re contemplating raiding the savings you’ve built up for something that’s more of a “want” than a “need.” Or if your goal was to start your own business, perhaps self-doubt is creeping in; the goal seems too hard or daunting. Maybe your motivation is slacking, and the initial excitement is starting to wear off. What do you do to stay on track toward your goal?

Be Accountable To Yourself

Start by being accountable to yourself—these are your goals, after all and the most important person to be accountable to is you! Write down your goals. Then keep track of how you’re doing.  One of my favorite tools for self-accountability is to keep a journal. There’s just something about the act of having to write it down that keeps me on the straight and narrow. You can keep an accountability journal for any goal you make.

Here are some ideas for things you may want to record in your accountability journal:

• Your baseline of where you started (for example, your savings at Day 1, or your credit card balance at the start of pursuing your goal, if you have a personal finance-related goal)
• Anything motivating that happened during the day that will keep you moving forward.
• Any challenges you faced and how you’ve overcome them.
• Any time you’ve gotten off track and what you can do to avoid it next time.
• How was your mood today and how did it affect your willpower?

Big goals are good things to have.  There’s nothing wrong with being ambitious.  But what if you’ve made a goal so big that you’re having a hard time motivating yourself to get started and/or keep going? Perhaps everything was going well for a few weeks, but then your motivation started to slip.  This is why coaches like me work with our clients to break that bigger vision and those ambitious goals down into smaller steps and along the way.  Think of it as a motivational hack. It’s all about setting mini goals that you can reach quickly. Here’s what can happen when you reach each mini goal along the way.

This is by no means an extensive list. Make it work for you. If you’re the creative type, add illustrations, get out your scrapbooking supplies and make it pretty. If that thought makes you cringe, keep it simple with a plain leather-bound journal and your favorite pen. You can even steal one of the notebooks from your child’s school supply stock and start there. If writing isn’t your thing, keep it simple. Start with just a few bullets of what you’ve done to get you closer to your goal and how you felt about it. It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that.

Don’t limit yourself to pen and paper either. If you prefer not to write, then use your computer and keep a digital journal. You could even go public and start a blog. Who knows, your online accountability journal may help and inspire others!

Find An Accountability Buddy

Having someone with the same or similar goals to talk to can be very motivating. Find someone to become your accountability buddy. You can cheer each other on, share tips and check in to make sure you’re both still on track.  If you can’t find a local friend to join you, consider looking for your “buddy” online. There are forums and groups for all sorts of topics and you’re sure to find the right person to help you stay on track.

Be Accountable to Family and Friends

Another great option is to share your goals and intentions with loved ones. Let them know you’re trying to work out each week, sketch out the first draft of your business plan, or pay down credit card debt.  Getting it out there and knowing that you have loved ones checking in on you can really help to keep you going. Plus, they might become your biggest cheerleaders helping you celebrate each small success along the way.

Be Bold and Make a Public Statement

If you’re feeling brave or want that extra boost of accountability, be bold and make a public statement. Take to your favorite social media outlet and announce to the world at large what you plan to do. Knowing that your readers, followers, and/or friends are keeping up with your progress can help add a layer of accountability.

Find a Coach

Working with a professional coach can be a great way to not only get support on setting your goals, but on staying on track to achieve them.  Coaches like me are trained on techniques to help our clients stay accountable toward their goals and action steps—and, importantly, on how to hold our clients accountable in a supportive and non-judgmental way.  After all, we understand that life happens and sometimes we get off track with our goals! When that occurs, the important thing is not to beat ourselves up if we miss a milestone or fall off the wagon, but rather to figure out how to get going in the right direction again—and to think critically about why we got off track.  Maybe the goal, its smaller subgoals, and/or its timeline weren’t realistic, given everything else going on in your life. Perhaps after you started working toward that goal, you realized it wasn’t actually that important to you after all, and that’s part of what caused your motivation and progress to slow.  A trusted coach can help you revisit and revise your goals as needed as part of the accountability process.

I hope some of these accountability tips are helpful to you as you’re working on your goals.  Next week, we’ll conclude the April blog series on goals by talking about what to do when you complete your goal and how to keep your goal setting going over the long term.

One of the reasons it can feel difficult to stick to our goals is because we don’t always see big results right away.  It often doesn’t matter what our specific goal is—whether we’re trying to start and keep up with an exercise routine, launch a business, save money, or quit smoking. Many of us stick with the program for a few weeks and then start to lose steam and motivation. It takes a lot to keep going and it isn’t easy to change our habits for the better.  What we need to stay on track is a little motivation. If we can see that we’re moving in the right direction (even if it isn’t always as fast as we’d like it to be), we’ll keep going and opt to take that brisk exercise walk, take that money we were tempted to spend on a treat and put it into our savings account instead, sketch out that first draft of our business plan, or resist that urge to have a cigarette.

But how do we see this progress? We see it by tracking and measuring and writing it down. It doesn’t matter if you use a pen and paper, your computer, an app on your phone, or some other tracking solution that works for you.  You want to be able to see that progress in front of you in black and white! Let’s talk about what to track. If you want to work on your fitness, you can write down your planned workouts, or log your workouts in an app, a notebook, or spreadsheet as you complete them.  Or you can use a spreadsheet or an app to track your spending and savings if you’re working toward a personal finance goal. And having all this data can be very motivating:  six months into your journey, you may not see a lot of change day to day, but looking back at where you were on Day One and how far you’ve come already will keep you going.

If your goal is to stop smoking, make a check mark on your calendar for each day you make it without a cigarette. As the check marks start to add up, so will your resolve to keep it up.  If your goal is to pay down credit card debt, or build a financial safety net, keep a running total of your numbers.  It doesn’t matter what your goal is, keeping track of how you’re doing and how far you’ve come already can be a big motivator to stick to the plan until you reach your goal.

Big goals are good things to have.  There’s nothing wrong with being ambitious.  But what if you’ve made a goal so big that you’re having a hard time motivating yourself to get started and/or keep going? Perhaps everything was going well for a few weeks, but then your motivation started to slip.  This is why coaches like me work with our clients to break that bigger vision and those ambitious goals down into smaller steps and along the way.  Think of it as a motivational hack. It’s all about setting mini goals that you can reach quickly. Here’s what can happen when you reach each mini goal along the way.

It Makes You Feel Successful.  It feels good when you reach a goal, doesn’t it? It’s internal positive reinforcement. You cheer yourself on and get all pumped up. Why not take advantage of that great feeling of success throughout your journey to reach your big goal. Set those mini goals and celebrate reaching each milestone. If you’re working on growing your savings or paying down credit card debt, you may want to set smaller mini goals: for example, saving $10 per week rather than focusing on saving $40 per month. Celebrate each time you reach that next mini goal and bask in your success. Use the motivation to tackle those next savings deposits.

It Shows You That You’re Making Progress.  Reaching each mini goal also means you’re a step closer to your end goal. You’re making actual, measurable progress. It’s easy to lose sight of that when you’re dealing with a bigger task or a large number. Those mini goals are visual proof that you’re moving in the right direction.

It Gives You A Boost of Confidence.  Seeing that success and progress gives you a big boost of confidence. And rightfully so. You’re putting in the work and you are seeing the results. You should be proud. Put that confidence to good use. You’ve got this.

Don’t be afraid to share your success with loved ones. Getting praise for reaching each mini goal can boost your confidence even further. (I’ll talk more in next week’s post about how we can enlist friends or family members as accountability partners to help us stick to our goals!) And don’t forget to give yourself a big pat on the back as well.

When you have a big goal it’s hard to stay excited and motivated about it for weeks and months to come. For example, we all know we should get more active and exercise at least a few times a week. But that doesn’t mean we look forward to it or that it’s easy to carve out the time in our busy schedules. What do you do to keep going and stay motivated to lace up those walking or running shoes each day? You can reward yourself along the way. Think about what would motivate you as a reward. Maybe it’s a fun new T-shirt to wear on your workouts, maybe it is pizza and a movie after a week of working out. Maybe it’s a small treat that makes you feel good but doesn’t eat too much into your savings or debt payoff plan, if you’re working on a financial goal.  Start by figuring out what your reward will be. Feel free to mix and match. The goal here is to keep yourself motivated. Then figure out what you need to do to “deserve” your special reward. Make it a challenge but keep it attainable.

Work hard to reach your mini goal and then celebrate and enjoy your reward. Rinse and repeat until you reach your end goal. Keep a visual reminder of your reward around if you find it helpful. Cut out a picture of that beach where you want to vacation once you’ve hit your savings goal, or a photo that represents how you’ll feel when you’re debt-free. Or spend a few minutes browsing through Netflix each evening after your workout contemplating what movies or shows you’ll watch while you veg on the couch this weekend.  I do a vision board at the beginning of every year and keep it posted someplace where I’ll see it regularly. I also make sure to set myself a quarterly “appointment” to review my goals, progress, and update my vision board.

Pick your rewards and put them to work. See if having that little carrot dangle in front of you won’t get you to stick to your resolution. If one particular reward just doesn’t seem to keep you motivated, feel free to switch it up and try something else. Just be careful you don’t sabotage your progress with your reward. Use common sense and just try it. See what ends up motivating you the most and keep using those reward. These can all be great tips for staying motivated but what if you need a little more help to stick with your goals? (Spoiler alert, most of us do—including me!) This is where a friend, a family member, or a trusted coach who can serve as an accountability partner comes in.  In next week’s post, we’ll tackle the topic of accountability:  how to hold yourself accountable on your path to reaching your goals, and who else in your life you can enlist to help you along the way.  

Now that I’ve had a chance to introduce myself in Flourishing Fiercely’s first blog post, I’m excited to dive right in to my April blog series on a favorite topic of mine: Goals. Specifically, over the next four weeks, I’ll share why goals are important and meaningful, how to set goals, how to stay accountable and motivated to achieve your goals, and how to keep your momentum going long-term. In this post, I’ll focus on the “what,” “why,” and “how to get started” of goal-setting.

Late March/early April is a great time to revisit our resolutions and examine the difference between resolutions and goals, because we’re at the point in the year when, for many of us, our momentum and excitement around those perennial New Year’s resolutions has started to fade. If New Year’s resolutions work well for you, then great, definitely keep doing what you’re doing! But if you’re like many of us (including me!) who feel trapped in a pattern of setting resolutions every year on January 1, losing sight or losing steam on those resolutions as the coming weeks tick by and the busyness of daily life gets in the way, and then eventually breaking or giving up on our resolutions—only to feel guilty and repeat the cycle the following year—consider ditching the resolutions and focusing on goals instead!

We’re so used to breaking our resolutions, that we start to think it’s OK to try a little and then give up. It’s a mindset thing. A goal on the other hand, particularly if it’s a SMART goal (more on that in a minute), is something we believe we can reach. That makes us work a little harder and not give up on the end goal. In my experience, there are a couple of common reasons why resolutions tend to be less effective than goals.

First, resolutions often don’t have a strong connection to a “why.” Most of our New Year’s resolutions tend to revolve around a very few common themes: lose weight, exercise more, spend less, save more money, and so on. It’s understandable how this happens. The New Year’s resolution is a pretty strong cultural and consumer phenomenon in the United States, and around late December/early January we’re surrounded by ads for gym memberships or weight loss programs, for example, on TV or on social media. Similarly, the airwaves are filled with personal finance pundits lecturing us on what we “should” do with our money. Maybe we see our friends or family members making certain resolutions and we get swept along with the tide, thinking that we ought to make resolutions like those as well.

Goal-setting on the other hand, requires us to think much more critically about not only what we want to accomplish but why we want to accomplish it. As a coach, when clients start to brainstorm with me about their potential goals, one of the first things I ask is “What makes this goal important to you?” or “what’s meaningful to you about that goal?” We’re much more likely to stick with a goal if we can connect the goal to a bigger purpose that’s truly important to us (versus, for example, a resolution we set just because we felt we “should” or because other people were doing it too).

Second, resolutions tend to be pretty vague, whereas goals are specific: When do you want to quit smoking and how are you going to get there? What does it mean to you to “get in better shape”? How much money do you want to have in the bank and what do you want to save it up for?

Goals allow you to be a lot more specific. You can set attainable goals with a deadline and milestones or mini goals along the way. The SMART goal framework that I mentioned briefly above stands for:

That specificity is what helps make a goal a SMART goal. Similarly, when we consider the T (time-bound) in SMART goals, sometimes a year—the typical timeframe for a New Year’s resolution—is too long of a timeframe. Early in January we feel like we have lots and lots of time to get our act together. Then time starts to get away from us and then we find ourselves in, say, October and our goal seems impossible to reach. So what should you do instead? Be specific and attach timelines to the goals and action steps. What’s the goal you’d like to reach? Put down a number or describe what success looks like at the end of achieving that goal. When do you want to reach your goal by? It could be December 31st, but it doesn’t have to be.

After you’ve set your bigger end goal, set some mini goals along the way. To turn resolutions into reality, you need to know what you’ve got to do on a weekly or even daily basis to make it happen. And you can’t do that unless you have a set end goal. In other words, start at the end, and then figure out what it will take to get there. Let’s look at an example. Let’s say you want to get out of credit card debt this year, and you’ve used an online calculator to figure out that you’ll need to pay $300 every month in order to wipe out your whole balance (the principal plus the additional interest that will accrue throughout the year.) And by setting an end date of December 31st, you know exactly what you need to do each month to get there. From there you can work on an action plan. You could look for opportunities to pick up extra work, if possible, to generate more money to put toward that monthly payment; or take another look at your monthly budget to see if you have any discretionary expenses that you can redirect toward your payoff fund.

You may also want to do a gut-check to make sure your goal fits in with the “A” in SMART goals: Achievable.  It’s great to set an ambitious goal—and often times those “stretch” goals can help us push ourselves to redefine the limits of what’s possible—but at the same time, you don’t want to set yourself up for disappointment or create a goal that’s so difficult to reach that you’ll risk giving up.  For instance, not everyone’s main job or family circumstances allow them to pick up extra work hours; or perhaps you know you have a major necessary expense coming up that will require you to divert one or two months’ worth of your credit card payoff goal.  Maybe it’s more achievable to set an 18-month credit card payoff goal rather than a 12-month timeline (or 12-months instead of six months, etc.)  Remember:  there’s no “right” or “wrong” timeline or set of action steps for your goal; you are in charge of the steps to achieve your goal and the timeframe.

If you have a big goal—for example, saving $5,000, starting a business, or changing jobs—over the coming year, check in every couple of weeks and make sure you’re still on track. If you can, and if it makes sense for the goal, get a little ahead of schedule to give yourself a buffer when things come up and get in the way of working on your action steps (illness, a vacation, a large deadline that takes up time at your job).  Getting ahead of your goal schedule gives you a bit of a buffer to work with. And tracking your progress (more on that in next week’s blog post!) can help you maintain your momentum.

If you have an end date and break your goal down into monthly (or weekly or quarterly) chunks you start to see some progress. And that will keep you motivated to make it to the next milestone and then the next. Before you know it you’re getting pretty close to your goal. Doesn’t that sound like a much better strategy?  Give it a try. Instead of “just” making a resolution, make a SMART goal and plan it out. It doesn’t have to take you the entire year. If you can reach your goal sooner, all the better.

Sticking with our goals—even meaningful, carefully thought-out SMART goals—can be easier said than done.  Old habits are hard to break, life gets busy, stressful situations pop up, and it’s normal to struggle with motivation from time to time.  We’ve all been there! Over the next three weeks, the next blog posts in my April goal-setting series will focus on tips to maintain motivation, build accountability mechanisms into your goal-achievement journey, and help set yourself up for long-term success.  In the meantime, I hope this week’s post has given you a good overview of the importance of goal-setting and SMART goals.  Do you have a big goal that you want to accomplish in 2023? Have you thought about ways that you can make it a SMART goal? Feel free to share with the Flourishing Fiercely community in the comments below!