The Best Way To Set Your Goals

January is here and with that comes a clean slate for a New Year full of promise, expectations and New Years Resolutions.  For me rather than setting resolutions which within a few weeks have fallen by the wayside, I set goals.

Goals are important as they give you a direction to move towards what you would like to achieve in a measurable and specific way.

It’s important to make your goals SMART – Specific, Measurable, Achieveable, Realistic and Timely.

When setting a goal you want to include the date is to be achieved by, how you will know when you have achieved it and keep it positive.

An great example of a goal is:

“It’s the 30th June 2015 and I am able to run 10km in under 1 hour.”

You can see from this goal it is very specific to running a distance.  Measurable because you can run 10km and check the time.  It’s achievable, I am able to run and have the time to train.  It’s certainly realistic – It’s not a marathon which would be unrealistic in 6 months for someone who doesn’t run very often.  Finally it has a date in the goal so it is timely.

This is how I set all of my big goals throughout the year.

The next step is how you are going to achieve your goals.  Goals are achieved by daily, weekly and monthly activity and a plan!

Your daily activity is what you can do each day to get you closer to your goal.  Using the running goal above a great daily goal would be to track daily activity.

A weekly goal would be to run 3 times a week.

A monthly goal can be to run a certain distance each month, so in January the monthly goal could be to run 4km non-stop.

You can then assess your daily, weekly and monthly goals to see what you can do better and what you did well.

Another great idea when goal setting is to have a reward for achieving your goal.  When you achieve the big goal of running 10km in an hour your chosen reward might be to buy the dream handbag you’ve been lusting after.  For achieving a daily goal you may allow yourself to indulge in the Kardashian’s for an hour, guilt free.  By creating rewards you will want to complete your goals each day, week and month.

It is good to have big goals but I also believe in smaller goals which are more achievable!  This is where I fallen down in the past – Set a huge goal, not hit it and been disappointed.  This year although I believe in dreaming big I am setting smaller goals for the first few months and making them a stretch but attainable.

I would also advise to have no more than 10 goals at a time – Feel free to reassess and change your goals if you decide you no longer want to achieve something.

What are your goals in 2015?  Share below.