How To Make The Best Of 2021
With 2020 now behind us, it is time to start looking ahead into the new year, 2021. In order to make the best of the year ahead, we have to make sure to set our goals, our intentions, and establish a vision in terms of what we want to achieve for this year.
Creating the "best year of our life" is not something we are just given, so we have to input effort and work into making it the "best" we can.
With this blog post, I hope to share some advice on how to make this year great and full of amazing opportunities, how to set goals for the new year, and how to get what we want from this year.
If you want to join me in the journey of making 2021 an amazing year, I encourage you to read on and I hope to fill you with inspiration, motivation, and ideas to power you up for the upcoming year.
You got this :)
SETTING GOALS - THINGS TO CONSIDER BEFOREHAND
Consider the 5 W's:
What resources will I need to achieve my goal?
How long will I need to get to my goal?
Why do I want to achieve this?
How will I achieve this?
When will I make time to work towards my goal?
Have a source of feedback throughout the process of getting to your goal
Identify some potential problems, setbacks, and distractions before starting
Breakdown long complex goals into simpler and shorter ones
Frame the goal as a learning task and not just a performance task
In order to make sure that you get to the end, consider potential outcomes and rewards you will give yourself to motivate your progress further
THE PROCESS OF SETTING GOALS
START WITH SOMETHING GENERAL
I am pretty sure that the majority of you who will be reading this will have already been familiar with the SMART format of setting goals, where the S stands for Specific and requires us to set a goal that is primarily specific and requires us to know exactly what we want to achieve.
However, whenever I try to use this template, I find that trying to be too specific in the beginning is not the right approach because a) I’m either not sure how specific to get about a goal and b) because it actually hinders my process of getting to the goal because it encourages the mentality of having to have everything figured out before you can start moving towards your goal. I am not however saying that this is a problem for everyone, however, if you do find this issue familiar, then I suggest first set a general direction in which you want to go.
For example in the case that you want to be more of a physically active person, say that you want to start running more. This is your general direction. If you instead straightway force yourself to be super specific about what you want to achieve, you are more likely to get stuck before you even start.
GET SPECIFIC
Once you have a general goal in mind, start thinking about the specific of it and begin to narrow down what exactly in that field you want to achieve. This stage is also where you implement all the other aspects of the SMART goal format which are also essential to consider when setting goals.
Other areas to consider:
Measurable: How can I measure my goal? When will I have known that I have achieved my goal?
Attainable: Is this goal realistic with my current circumstances and will I be able to properly manage my time and energy to achieve it?
Relevant: Is the goal that I am heading towards relevant to me and meaningful enough for me? If it is not relevant enough to your personal interests, you are likely to lose motivation in the initial stages
Time-bound: In what time period do I want to achieve my goal? How frequently will I be working towards achieving my goal? On a daily, weekly, monthly basis?
IMPLEMENT
Now that you have made your goal much more specific and you are much more precise in terms of what you want to achieve, start to implement the necessary actions that will take you towards your goal.
Put aside one week to test out and see how you do with sticking with your goal and how realistic it is for you. This is the time where you are able to see all of the faults in your goal and all the other things you did not take into account during your goal-setting process.
For example, if your goal was to read 50 pages of a book each day for 7 days a week, and you found out that realistically you were only able to read that 4 days in a week, then that is a sign that you need to adjust your goal.
The point of this step is not to make you guilty that your goal was set inadequately, but instead to allow you to see the ways in which you have to alter your goal in order to actually achieve it. The theory is often very different than when we practically apply something in our life.
ADJUST AND IMPLEMENT AGAIN
After you have tried to implement the necessary actives on a daily basis you would have likely noticed that more adjustments have to be made to your goal. Maybe you were expecting too much from yourself, maybe too little. Perhaps you did not have enough disposable time in your day, or you simply did not find the goal enough interesting or meaningful by the end of the week.
This is all okay and all should be treated as valuable feedback towards creating more realistic and relevant goals.
Now take these adjustments and changes and input them into your initial goal. Change things around based on your previous experiences, and give things another shot. Set aside once again another couple of days of experimenting and see whether this time you do better with sticking to the goal.
If you find yourself still slipping back and not sticking to what you set out to do, look towards making changes once again or perhaps considering other areas that may be preventing progress, such as maybe not having enough personal discipline to stick with it. This simply means that you have to improve on some other areas before starting out on achieving your goal since you will need some other skills r knowledge in order to get to the finish line.
For example, if your goal is to make 3 drawings per week in order to make you fit for an art competition and you are a beginner at drawing, maybe the issue is not that you don’t have enough time or motivation, but perhaps you would need a little more work on your art technique in order to enhance your drawing ability. This will later then greatly help you out with coming closer to your goal.
GO AND ACHIEVE IT
Once you have made your goal specific, have tried it out in practice, and had made sure to make any necessary alterations to it, now is the time to go out, commit to your goal, and also achieve it.
You will with no doubt encounter setbacks and delays in between the progress, but just keep pushing, adapting, and pursuing your goal. Let your goal be flexible because life around us is constantly changing so make sure to take that into account when moving towards the finish line.
I recommend that you do this exercise with a maximum of 3-5 goals per time because otherwise it just becomes too much to handle and think about, especially if we have already got plenty of other work on our back.
QUESTIONS TO REFLECT ON
What are my top 5 intentions for this year?
What am I going to continue doing?
What do I want to change completely?
What will I do to step out of my comfort zone?
How will I make sure to learn from my future mistakes?
What are the top 3 things I want to accomplish this year in my academic life/ career?
What are the top 3 things I want to accomplish this year for my health and personal wellbeing?
What are the top 3 things I want to accomplish this year in terms of my health and personal interests?
What will be my purpose this year?
Which existing relationships do I want to focus on and strengthen?
What kind of new people do I want to attract into my life?
In what ways will make this year matter to me when I look back?
How will I help and provide value to others?
What personal qualities do I want to strengthen?
What skills do I want to learn?
How will I take care of myself?
What places do I want to visit?
What occasions and opportunities will I say “no” to?
Who will I ask for help and support from?
What kind of person do I want to become next year?
