How do you feel about New Year’s resolutions? Does setting goals for yourself help you to start the New Year with a positive focus? Does having resolutions help to motivate you? Or are they just an unhelpful reminder of the things you haven’t achieved?
If you are anything like me, you may be approaching the end of January with the familiar feeling of already having lost sight of resolutions that you began the year determined to follow through on. Perhaps you have had an unexpectedly difficult month, with many demands on your time and attention that have left you feeling you have no time to focus on your goals. Maybe you put everything into your resolutions for a week or two, and then found that you ran out of energy to keep going. Or perhaps the dark days and cold weather have just made it difficult to motivate yourself full stop.
In this situation, it’s easy for what might have started out as a way of encouraging yourself to focus on what is important to you in life to become just another a stick to beat yourself up with. And if you are also feeling low in mood, as many of us are at this time of year, this can be particularly difficult to cope with.
So why set goals at all? It’s easy to see why some people might decide to wash their hands of New Year’s resolutions altogether. However, research suggests that goal setting can be a helpful way of motivating ourselves to live more in line with our values, and to overcome obstacles to move towards things that are important to us. This is one of the reasons that your CBT therapist will always help you to set goals for treatment at the beginning of therapy. So how can we set goals that work for us?
Here are some top tips:
- Try to make your goals specific.
- We are much more likely to act on a specific goal such as ‘read one chapter of my book every day’ than a more general one like ‘take more time for myself’.
- Break your goals down into smaller steps.
- When we set goals, we think about where we want to be, rather than where we are now. This can be motivating, but can also be disheartening if it feels like the gap between the two is a big one. Breaking your goals down means that you can choose to focus on the next step, rather than constantly being aware of how far there is to go.
- Plan in time to review your goals regularly.
- If you find you aren’t making progress towards your goal, aim to consider what might be getting in the way of this. Is this goal still the right one for you? Is it realistic? Can you break it down any further? Is there anyone you could ask for support?
- Be compassionate towards yourself.
- Changing behaviours is hard work. We are all doing the best we can under difficult circumstances, and it’s okay to have days where we let things slip. Give yourself credit for the things you are already achieving, allow yourself to set realistic targets that will help you to build on these things, and then give yourself credit for any new achievements!
So ask yourself – what could your not-quite-New Year’s resolutions be?
Lantern Psychotherapy 