Goal Setting for People Who Keep Trying and Failing at Their Goals

What the world doesn’t need is another life coach spouting goal setting tips ahead of the new year, right?

Right.

I’ll spare you that.

Instead, I’ll flip this a bit from HOW to set goals in the new year to WHY it’s worth doing it, even if you’ve set the same ones over and over (hello, weight loss….I see you over there, credit card balance….) to no avail (in other words, even if you’re human).

I’ll do my best to spare you the typical life coachy shit about goals - they keep you motivated, they give you something to measure, and make sure they’re S.M.A.R.T. blah blah….you ARE smart. You know what you’re supposed to do to set and reach your goal, and you probably even know why you haven’t reached yours yet. What you may not know is why it’s worth it to keep trying, or why it’s worth it to set even bigger goals, when you probably have struggled to meet your current ones (if you’ve met them at all).

At the most fundamental, and yet most important, it’s worth the effort to set and then go after your goals for this reason: setting goals is not about achieving the goal, it’s about who you become along the way to achieving it.

(Sorry, but how’s that for some life coachy shit?)

Here’s what I mean by that: in order to do something new, in order to achieve something you don’t typically do or achieve - which is what a goal is - you need to become someone different than who you are. You need to take different actions in order to get different results. And to take different actions, you need to think different thoughts and feel different feelings. And if you’re thinking different thoughts….you are a different version of yourself. It’s the roadmap to all of this.

When you set a goal and start moving towards it, you have no choice but to become a different version of you. A goal that you’re actually, truly committed to will help you prioritize not only your time but your actions and values. Here’s what I mean: if your goal is to run a marathon this year and you commit to your long run on Saturday mornings, then you may give up your Friday night drinks in order to make that happen. If your typical Friday night involves cocktails, you not drinking on Fridays is you making decisions as a new version of you.

Or let’s say your goal is to start your nonprofit on the side of your day job and home life, you’re going to need to have some constraints around your time. If you have 1 hour a night where you usually watch TV but that’s an hour you could be working on your nonprofit. You may set a constraint of no TV during the week so that you can get that work done for yourself in the name of your goal. It’s you reprioritizing. It’s you setting new constraints around what you’re valuing right now.

So HOW to achieve your goals? That’s the easy part. Google it. Talk to people who’ve done it. Get a coach. But WHY you should keep trying to achieve them even if you’ve failed (a lot) in the past?

Because you might really fucking like the you who you become on the other side of all that trying.