How to hit your goals in 2021 (even after the motivation has faded)

It’s a new year and the internet is awash with everyone setting new goals, New Year's resolutions, and intentions for the year ahead. 

It’s easy to get swept up in it all, especially since human beings have been setting resolutions at New Years for over 4,000 years (source: History.com). It’s basically ingrained into us. 

Yet only 8% of people achieve their goals. 

8%! 

What the actual. 

That is so ridiculously low…so where does it all go wrong? 

In this post, I’m going to suggest ways that you can make goal setting actually work this year. 

Review your previous year 

To move forward towards the right goals, make sure that you’re taking stock of what worked and didn’t work for you last year first. 

What do you want more of? 

What do you want less of? 

And what can you ditch altogether? 

These questions can bring so much clarity to your goal setting process. Don't fall into the habit of just repeating the previous year. Really question what worked and didn't work, and what you're done with. 

For example, if you recognise that you spent way too much scrolling social media in 2020, you could set a goal about reducing it so you have more energy for things that matter.

Clear your limiting beliefs 

If you set a big lofty income goal for the year, but you're not fully on-board that it’s even possible for you, it’s very unlikely it will be achieved. 

Why? 

Because in our unconscious mind, there are our ingrained beliefs and stories that we are not smart enough, not good enough, don’t deserve it, are not worthy enough, and so on. 

Our unconscious mind is in charge of 93% of our thoughts (source: find) 

So if we want to be a millionaire, yet our own minds are telling us on the sly that it’s not possible, what chance do we have?!?! 

The key is to clear these limiting beliefs before setting any goals. 

Otherwise our old friends procrastination, self-sabotage and our inner critic will come out in force. 

Then it’s much more possible to hit our goals, be disciplined and create new habits. 

Create a self love practice 

Self esteem and self love are tightly connected with the likelihood of whether you’re going to achieve your goals. 

Because anything worth achieving always comes with challenges. If you’re looking to create and scale an online course, start to build your team, or lose 10kg’s, it’s going to require commitment and sometimes dealing with situations that you don’t want to be in. 

With a high level of self-love, you can persevere through these harder tasks. You’re more likely to be disciplined and do what is required to achieve your goals. Because you know you’re worth it. 

If there’s some unworthiness loitering in the background there (which is super common by the way), it’s going to have an impact on your goals. 

A higher level of self love equals knowing that you’re worthy of all successes. You will have an unwavering strength within yourself to move forward, even through the challenges. 

I highly recommend reading the book ‘You Can Heal Your Life’ by Louise Hay and start with the mirror work. 

Because you are so worthy of all your big goals, and the sooner you realise it, the easier they will come! 

Set goals that are in full alignment with where you want to go 

It’s vital that you choose goals that you truly want, not what society wants you to have, or that other people expect you to achieve. 

If you’re out of alignment in your business, it might be showing up as feeling burnt out and constantly self-sabotaging. This is how it showed up for me when I hit burnout a few years ago. It wouldn’t matter what goals I set, I was only really setting them to have goals. On a deeper level, I didn’t really want to achieve them because it would mean I was growing a business that I didn’t like. Of course, I didn’t achieve them because they were the wrong goals. 

Instead I should have chosen goals to transition to a new business model that I did love. I did eventually end up doing this, and it was much easier to hit the goals because I wanted the outcome. 

So make sure any new goals light you up!! Make sure they’re connected to things that you are super passionate about. If your goals connect with your big why, they will be so much easier to achieve. When you come across challenges, you’re more likely to buckle down and do the work, rather than give up and forget about them. 

Being in alignment with your goals is vital for success. 

Set goals for your whole life (not just business) 

You are not your business, and your business is not you. It can feel like it’s all one but your worth as a human being should not be attached to your business success. 

There are so many other things in life as well as business, and they all deserve attention. 

And it’s very likely that issues that are coming up in your business are also showing up elsewhere in your life. The saying ‘how you do anything is how you do everything’ comes to mind. 

Some other areas to think about are fun and recreation, physical environment, finances, health, personal growth, romance, and family and friends. 

Start by rating all of those areas out of 10, set some goals around how you’re going to improve in these areas, and then review every 90 days. Look up Wheel of Life on Google to get some templates for this. 

Write your goals down daily 

It’s very common to forget what your goals even are! I was in mastermind this past year, and we would always be asking the facilitator to remind us of our goals! That’s a sure sign that they are the wrong goals. 

If you’re serious about setting your goals, create a daily ritual where you write your goals down. Like journaling, but simply rewriting your goals. Extra points if you write them as though they’ve already been achieved. 

This serves two purposes:

It’s going to remind you of where you’re heading on a daily basis, and you will be more likely to craft your days around reaching those goals rather than getting sidetracked. 

And the repetition means they’ll become so second nature to you that your unconscious mind will consider them done! 

Re-assess every 90 days 

Don’t wait until the end of the year to pull out your goals to see if you hit them. Instead, take some time every quarter of the year (at least) to see how you’re tracking towards them. 

It might be that you still want to achieve the goal, but you haven’t made any progress. This is a great time to then create some new actions that you can start doing now, so you can hit the goal by the end of the year. 

It could be that the goal doesn’t really float your boat anymore, so you can ditch that one! 

But if you create your goals at the start of the year and don’t look at them again until the end of the year, it’s highly likely you’ll be in the 92% of people who don’t hit their goals. 

So there’s my tips to make your shiny new goals for this year actually come to fruition. As you see, there’s more to it than those feel good vibes as the clock strikes midnight on New Years.

If you put all of these into action, I’m sure this year is going to be one for the books!