Is Setting New Year's Goals a Good Habit?

It’s the start of a new year - The time when we are supposed to make a set of goals for ourselves. To start fresh, and do better 

I always pick a health goal, a family goal, and a work goal.  

They are often much the same - eat better, meal plan, exercise more, hug more, listen more, save more. There is always a desire for more in terms of improvement!

I am in the business of helping people reach their goals, but I don’t often reach mine if I am to be honest because I get busy and am distracted by everything. 

Before I sat down to write this blog I clicked on my email to do a quick check and then started signing on for a Mediterranean diet and a 6 month course. 

I didn’t press the final button to spend the money, but I spent 30 minutes looking at what they had to offer when I could have been writing the blog which was my most important goal for this morning. 

So my aim for this blog was to talk about goal setting, which can be about prioritising some goals and making sure we are defining them clearly and then breaking the goals down into achievable parts.  

Every day I help the families I work with set goals and support them by breaking goals down into achievable smaller goals. Often families have some pretty big and very important goals when they first come to meet me. They are overwhelmed with where to start and every day they don’t feel some success with working towards their child’s goals is another day they feel they are not having success, feeling reinforced and feeling motivated to keep going.  

The Importance of establishing habits for your family

It’s incredibly important and a good one to go over when you are feeling overwhelmed with how many goals you have and how big they are.  

But I think this needs to be about habits, creating good habits and making it easy for you to do what is needed - not to get distracted, not to think it is too hard, not to give up before you have started or give up when it gets a little uncomfortable. We need to create habits, and repeat them, even when it gets hard to do so.

I often tell parents when their kids don’t like doing something that they really want them to do, like going to the beach. If the parents happen to love going to the beach then they need to make it a habit and set themselves up in the best ways possible to repeat that habit, even while being tested by the behaviour of their kids.

Some people would question that and say - ooh we shouldn’t be pushing our kids and if it’s not their choice then … I don’t know. 

But, if I let my kids make all their choices they wouldn’t have had so many amazing experiences and they would possibly be choosing things that aren’t such healthy habits like hmmm… eating whole packets of Chocolate biscuits and binge-watching whole seasons of Modern Family all day.  That would be one of my boys' first choice.  

We have to make some choices for them, what we think is important for our family and we need to try and establish good habits that suit our family. If we try really hard and we don’t quite get there we may just need some additional support to help us and sometimes we do decide it may not be worth it and there are other things that take priority.  

But the most important thing  is we create some goals and we work out a starting point that will give us some success. Then we repeat that over and over until we are ready to make it a little more difficult.

Possibly make us a little uncomfortable, possibly not do as well, and possibly need a little help to get to the next step but you have to try. 

Try and try again and then you will get there and it will no longer be so hard. You will enjoy doing it but then you will either decide to add to it to make it harder again, maybe uncomfortable, maybe not have success again, and you may need support in some way. It is a case of ‘Rinse and Repeat’. 

I have heard people say that repetition is the mother of learning. 

We just need to start with a little goal so we can get used to feeling success, learning from that and moving on.

I love that we repeat that feeling and that desire you get to push on toward the next win.

Those wins may be incremental at first but they will grow in time and your world grows with them.