The phase “New Year’s Resolutions” might be met with some cynicism (cue jokes about everyone joining the gym in January). If you’re into personal development, you’ll agree that goal setting is a key component and actually, the start of a new year is a great opportunity to set some.
Why is it then, that many of us struggle to set goals and see them through to success? This blog isn’t a lesson on writing S.M.A.R.T objectives, there’s plenty of literature on that anyway. Instead I want to share a tip that has helped me. This time last year, one evening whilst enjoying family time with my wife, two sisters and mum, we decided to try something we hadn’t done before. We went around the group and got each other to talk through our individual resolutions for 2014, picking our focus areas from our ‘Wheels of Life’ with a few basic rules 1) Be honest and 2) Try your best this year! I captured all our resolutions (on a spreadsheet, naturally…) and sent them around.
What we found was that by the simple act of sharing the goals with one another, it made us that extra bit more motivated to achieving what we said we’d do. By actually writing them down (and not just having them in your head) created greater commitment. Sharing also generated some healthy competition between us throughout the year we encouraged each other to stay on track.
At the end of the year, we reviewed our goals as a group and introduced a bit of ‘x factor style’ judge voting to see how we all fared up. This was a great exercise and above all, it was lots of fun. Setting our goals together really helped us over the year and so did the group reflection, so we’ve started ourselves a new trend for each year going forward.
It’s a pretty simple concept really, but can be very powerful. So whoever the team might be, set goals and share them.
