How to Set Positive-Minded Goals for the New Year

The new year is nearly here!

Whether this past year was good or bad for you, you now have a shiny blank slate to work with. Whether you achieved one goal this past year or one-hundred, none of that matters now. You’re being given the opportunity to start over and make your business – and yourself – the best it can possibly be!

This is your chance to dream – and dream BIG! A new year starts with few obstacles, a time of pure potential, and that’s pretty darn exciting.

Start by leaving your past behind you. Acknowledge it, and any lessons you learned from this past year, and then move on and greet the new year with open arms. Don’t dwell on little things like “I didn’t do enough last year” or “my blog traffic didn’t grow as much as I’d hoped.” That’s in the past now.

Focus on the future. The now.

Write Your Goals (Positively)

One of the tricks to living life positively – and having a positive-minded career – is watching what you say. Your internal dialogue is important, and has a huge impact on your ability to produce.

If your first thought is “I never write enough,” change that thought to “In the past, I didn’t write as much as I would have liked to, but now I’m going to write much more.”

Avoid absolutes and exaggerations like “I never” and “I always.” No one ever “never”s or “always”s anything! There’s wiggle room. Cut yourself some slack.

Acknowledge any disappointments you’ve had in yourself or your work ethic, but then quickly remind yourself that those were past flaws, and that you now have the chance to do better!

Don’t insult yourself or your career. If someone else was nagging at you with endless criticisms, you’d tell them to bugger off, right? So tell that to your internal critic as well.

You are in control of – and responsible for – your own mind. Make sure that mind is kind to you by practicing thinking positively and rewording anything critical or negative.

When you write out your goals, write them with hope and optimism. You might not complete all of them (and that’s okay!), but it’s important to get your dreams out of your head and onto paper so you can start planning for them. As Leonie Dawson once said, “A goal without a plan is just a wish.”

Take Small Steps

Part of the reason we set goals is so that we can work toward our goals.

Prioritize your list of goals and choose the goal that’s most important to you to work on first. Then break it down into smaller chunks.

If your goal is to “write more blog posts,” try starting out with a list of possible blog post titles. Then outline those posts. Then write them. Step by step, you’ll get it done.

It’s important to break your goals down into smaller steps. If you try to do everything all at once, you’re more likely to fail right out of the gate and then get discouraged.

For example, one of my goals is to “get healthier” (notice that I phrased that in positive terms, rather than the more negative “lose weight”). I started by making tiny changes to my diet, and then I joined a gym and started working out.

When I first started working out, it felt like I was going to diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeee on that treadmill. But I resolved to take it step by step. Small progress is still progress! And now, I’m happy to report, I’ve gone from 320lbs to 255lbs…and I’m still going!

That was just 30 minutes out of my day, three days a week. Hardly any time at all! And yet, whenever I leave the house, everyone marvels over how much “flatter” I look. That feels really good. And it was all thanks to planning out actionable steps for my overall goal.

If your goal is to “write more,” try spending 30 minutes each day writing. If you feel up to doing more: do more. So long as you take small steps toward your overall goal and KEEP AT IT, you’ll eventually achieve the results you’re looking for.

Set Realistic Deadlines

Going back to my goal of getting healthier for a minute… My goal “deadline” is to be under 200lbs by July of this upcoming year.

Why set a deadline?

Because, if you don’t, you’re likely to dawdle and not take those first steps to achieve your goal. And then you’ll be reading a post like this one about goal setting next year and wondering why you didn’t get anything done last time. You’ll be filled with regrets. And that’s no fun.

Set deadlines for your goals. But make them realistic.

Do you really think you can write 30 blog posts for your business’ website in a month? That’s a post a day! Now, 30 blog posts over the course of three months? That’s much more likely.

You’re not going to write a book in a day (well, not a good one, anyway). But you could definitely pull it off over the course of six months or a year. That’s absolutely doable. And I’m speaking from experience here.

Positivity + Persistence = Success

The first step toward success is believing that you can achieve the goals you’ve set for yourself. You do that by thinking positively and believing in yourself.

The next ingredient to add is persistence. Once you decide to believe in yourself and go after a goal, KEEP going after it. Leap over obstacles in your path, throw the naysayers to one side, and keep chasing after your dream.

No one knows what this next year will bring. But one thing’s for sure: we all have an equal chance at achieving our goals. So let’s go for it!

Got any goals you want to share with us? Share this article on Facebook and let us know. If there’s anything we can do to help you on the road to success, just ask. 🙂