Everyday Can Be New Year’s Day
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It’s getting late in January. How are your New Year’s resolutions going? Did you make any, or did the partying and holiday busyness interfere with addressing your goals for the year? These questions aren’t meant to cause guilt or shame but to get you thinking about the excitement you felt when setting those goals around the start of January. So many of us start the new year with the best intentions, but we blink a few times and realize it's January 20th and we haven’t gone to the gym once or created a budget, let alone stuck to one. Even if we did keep up for a while, how many of us get sidelined within a month or two and then think, “Oh well, there go my new year’s goals!” and give them up to some weird little chasm called the-goals-that-will-never-be? I visualize this as a place with lots of brand-new treadmills, blank budgets, uneaten fruits and veggies, and of course, single socks that we know our dryer ate. Ok, well, maybe not that last one, but you get the gist.
Did you know that 80% of New Year’s resolutions typically fail by February? So if you haven’t kept up, you’re in good company with most of society! New Year’s resolutions can be life-altering if you stick with them. However, what typically happens is we skip a day or two, which may turn into a week and then a few weeks. Then because we may tell ourselves, “I’ve skipped X amount of days, so why bother” which is when we generally decide to throw them away for the current year with the thought that we’ll try again next year. What if we take a new approach? What if we view every day as New Year’s Day?
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I don’t remember where I first learned the concept ‘every day can be new years day,’ but I liked it. A lot. It took some of the pressure off. And by taking some of the pressure off, it's easier to get back on the wagon, horse, or whatever thing you see yourself riding in pursuit of your goals. We spend so much energy kicking ourselves for not sticking to our goals. If we just refocused that energy on forgiving ourselves for missing a day or week or whatever and decided to get back to it, we’d get so much more accomplished. So, I offer you this: don’t always wait till new years to set goals or get back to your goals. Think of every day as new years day.
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Why not? Every day is quite literally a new day, so why can’t we set it up that whatever day you choose is the start of the new year for you? Once I allowed this concept to sink in, it changed how I approached goals. It doesn’t really matter if it’s the start of a new year, the beginning of a quarter, or just a random Tuesday. You can choose any day and time to set a new goal. Understanding this gives you more power. For instance, if you set up some new resolutions on New Year’s Day and take a day off by January 7th and then three days off by January 18th and tell yourself, “I give up - I’ve already failed this year - guess I’ll try again next year.” Rather than select this method, choose the mentality that every day can start a new year and make January 21st your New Year’s attempt at achieving your goals.
The biggest thing here is not to beat yourself up. If you decide you will give yourself a year to do something big, and within a few weeks, you notice more days you haven’t taken steps, reevaluate rather than beat yourself up. Ok, I know this is hard. Believe me, I know! I’m the queen of beating myself up when I don’t follow through on something. What I mean by reevaluating is to think about your goal and what it means to you. Is it so big that it overwhelms you? When I first walked the road of entrepreneurship, I thought I had to learn and be a master of everything all at once. I had to learn every single nook and cranny of what I wanted to teach. I needed to learn all the marketing tools and know everything about social media. Thankfully I had a great marketing person and friend in my life (who would make an excellent coach) talk me off the ledge more than once. Those chats helped me reevaluate my goals and make them a little smaller or break them down into manageable objectives with more realistic dates and timelines. Having something more attainable helped me stick to the goal.
Another thing those marketing chats helped me see was how fluid goals are. Don’t be too attached to the outcome, as it may change. The more you understand that plans are fluid and you can start them anytime, the more likely you will keep up with them. If you’re familiar with my story, then you know that my goal for entrepreneurship involved being an accent coach. This completely altered after a couple of years of working towards it because I knew the passion I needed wasn’t there. Thankfully, with the coaching I received and my ability to shift my thinking regardless of the time of year helped me turn my focus, and the passion flowed. As you learn and grow with your experiences, you may realize your goal simply needs to change. And if you are too attached to the need to achieve your goal before aiming for something else, you may never reach your full potential.
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When you let go of some rigidity, you increase your ability to analyze where you are with your goals. And you may realize the dream you gave yourself a year to achieve isn’t working for you after six months, and therefore may be quicker to change the goal and set a new date. For example, I had it in my head when I started that I had to do several social media platforms all at once. I’m not super familiar with social media and after some objection, I finally followed the advice of others by breaking it down to starting with just one platform that I knew reasonably well. So I set an intention that I would first grow my audience on that platform within three months before starting another platform. I learned enough about the first platform rather quickly and how to cross-post to a second platform. So, rather than sticking to the three-month original plan, I decided to alter it. So, even though I hadn’t achieved my goal of a specific number of followers on my first platform, I changed my goal to start growing an audience on two platforms at once. Interestingly, I have increased my second platform quicker than my first and with more people who did not begin as friends.
Regular evaluation of your goals, particularly if you’re not sticking to them, may help you identify the most important things about your plan to help you stick to it. So, if you set a three-month goal to lose 10 pounds and instead you’ve lost 2 pounds by the 2-month mark, reevaluate. Get out your journal and consider these questions:
Why do I want to achieve this goal? What’s important to me about it?
Did I overreach with this goal and/or timeline? If I did, why?
Can I make this a smaller goal and reevaluate it in a few months?
What worked over the last few weeks? What was going well on the days I did take steps toward my goal?
What didn’t work? Did legitimate interruptions come into play, and am I being hard on myself? Or did something get in the way mentally?
Did I devote enough energy to all of my objectives?
Can I ask someone for help or accountability with this goal?
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By evaluating what your goals are, how you worked with them and towards them, and why they were important, you may reveal specific roadblocks. Identifying roadblocks will help you be better prepared to deal with them when they show up. In addition, getting more intimate with your “why” may help you find the excitement around your goal again. The more excitement you can find in your dream, the more likely you will stick with the steps consistently. Lastly, examining what is and isn’t working will assist you in determining if your goal needs to be altered or broken into smaller, more manageable pieces or if it’s even worth pursuing. It may be that you actually wanted to work on something completely different.
Instead of giving up on your goal, analyze what went into making it and how you have shown up for it to clarify how to continue toward your dreams. And, of course, try viewing every day as new year’s day to take the pressure off yourself if you have missed a few days or weeks. Again, January 1st or any other day is not a magical time for setting goals that can be set and accomplished anytime. So, what’s your passion, and what will you do to make this a fantastic year? Even if today is July 2nd or September 6th.