Making Goals Manageable

If you’re having trouble staying on track to meet your New Year’s resolutions or making goals manageable, maybe it’s time to break your goals into mini-goals. The most common new years resolution is to lose weight, which is a great goal for many, but this goal is often destined to fail from day one. Maybe you’ve educated yourself on goal setting methods and have learned that rather than making your goal be to simply “lose weight”, you’ve revised it to be “lose x number of pounds by 2016. This is a much better goal; you’re now including a quantifiable variable as well as a deadline. I am highly goal oriented and I love to create goals as well as help others reach their goals, but I’ve found that traditional goal setting isn’t as efficient as it can be. Though the same general rules still apply, rather than create one goal for the entire year, I divide my goals into smaller, more attainable “mini-goals.” Here’s an example. Let’s pretend your goal is to lose 20 pounds by 2016. For some people this may seem unachievable. But let’s start breaking up this goal. You what to lose 20 pounds in a year, there are 365 days, 52 weeks, and 12 months in a year. For this type of goal, I would divide up the goal among months. 20 pounds in 12 months works out to (hang on let me divide this out…) 1.66 pounds a month. You could decide that you want to lose 1.66 pounds a month, but that doesn’t round very well. Let’s round up to two pounds monthly. You’re new goal could be to lose two pounds a month. How much more attainable does that sound compared to 20 pounds in a year? Additionally, by rounding up, we’ve also now built in some room for error. Let’s say you only lose one pound in June, that’s ok, you are still on track to meet the original goal of 20 pounds a year. As a bonus, if you meet the mini-goal every month you will have lost 24 pounds in a year! What works best for you will likely be different than what works best for me. However, if you’re looking to create new goals and have previously not had the success you were hoping for, I hope you will give this method a try. Breaking goals into smaller mini-goals has proven to be highly effective for me. Good luck!