Why most goal setting fails

Have you ever made a New Year’s resolution and seen your resolve fall by the wayside by the middle of February? I always avoid gyms in January as they are cluttered with people who aren’t committed to long-term fitness. It’s always much quieter at the end of February.

There’s a big reason that New Year’s resolutions fail and we’ve got a remedy. If I had to pick one reason it’s that people aren’t properly planning their goals and linking their goals to their values. It’s very easy to take someone else’s goal at a seminar and make it your own – the “I want to earn £4,000 per month from property”, but unless you know why you want this and you break it down to a set of measurable goals that are more meaningful and time-related, you’ll soon drift off course. If you drift off course because you didn’t plan how to get back on course, you can get frustrated, disillusioned or sometimes just distracted.

There’s a saying that the astronauts on the Apollo space missions were only flying on course for 3% of their flight time. The rest of the time they were adjusting courses and managing the smaller goals along the way.

So for me, the best way to manage goals is to:

  1. Have a goal setting system to go from my values down
  2. Make the goals SMART and visible
  3. Have a system to create and manage systems to achieve the goals

To make the goal setting process simple and convenient, we’ve put together a worksheet template for you to use.