How to Easily Achieve Your New Year Goals

Happy New Year!  Hopefully you are feeling good and not nursing a sore head!  If you are, I hope you had a fantastic time and it was worth it!

I love the New Year – it’s a time to make plans and goals for the year ahead. It’s like a fresh start, like hitting the reset button after what is usually a full-on Christmas period.

This year I am making a promise to myself to improve my tennis (I’m a complete novice) with the goal being able to play a game competently and keep the balls actually in the court and not in the next field and get fitter.

My main work goal is to have my first online programme online and available on my website by July this year.  This one brings the ‘mind monkeys’ out, telling me there’s no way I can do this and it is beyond me – so looking forward to silencing them!

Did you know it is thought only 8% of people achieve their New Year Resolutions.  So how can you improve your chances of achieving your goals for 2018?

Firstly – don’t impose any drastic ‘rules’ on yourself. Telling yourself you are going to hit the gym everyday, stop doing that ‘thing’ immediately, lose two stone in a month is most likely not going to be realistic therefore you will give up your efforts fairly soon.

It’s a common human trait that as soon as you tell yourself you can’t do or have something then you want it more, or that you have to do something – then you just don’t want to.

If you use your amazing mind power to help you instead of hinder you – achieving what you want becomes far easier.  Here are some ways to active your mind for positive outcomes:

1 Bring your goal to life. 

Close your eyes, relax and imagine you have already achieved it.   Fully immerse yourself in the experience of having already got there.  What’s life like for you now? How does it feel having achieved it. What are people saying to you, what are you doing now that you weren’t before? What’s good about it?  Spend some time creating this ‘mind movie’ you will star in.

By making a clear mental vision of you having achieved it and daydreaming this regularly – will programme your unconscious mind for success. Like a sat nav – your mind needs somewhere to aim for.  Many people focus on what they don’t want, rather than what they do.  Focusing on what you DO want, not only makes you feel happier and more positive, it also makes it more likely you will achieve it.

2 Establish the process

Now you have your outcome goal set, what changes will you bring in on a daily basis.  What needs to happen consistently in order to get you to your destination.  Small changes can get big results.  Make a plan.  Make a promise to yourself to do it.  Imagine yourself doing these small changes every day.  Positive imagining gets positive results.  You see athletes before their races visualising the race going perfectly.  This is because the same neural pathways in your brain are activated when imagining something, as when physically doing it, therefore the more established (mentally rehearsed) a neural pathway is, the more likely it is going to happen automatically when in the real situation.

2 Write down all the benefits

Using positive language, ie. stating what you want rather than what you don’t want – write down all the benefits to you of working towards and achieving the outcome you want.  This is your why.  There may be days when you will be tempted to sabotage your efforts – this is a good time to bring out your benefits list and re-visit why you started to implement the changes in the first place.  Even better, create a vision board of images that engage your emotions and motivate you.  Pinterest is a good place to do this as you can create a private board and pin images that symbolise your outcome.

4 Change your self talk

Talk to yourself in a positive encouraging way – like a good friend would.   Tell yourself  you absolutely can do it, tell your self you will do it, one day at a time.  If the pesky mind monkeys appears, tempting you away or telling you there’s no way you can – tell them politely, or not so politely to go away.  You absolutely can do anything you put your mind to so don’t let those old limiting beliefs stop you.