Week 4: Small victories and self-compassion
People fail to stick with their New Year’s resolutions for many reasons, but there’s one simple technique that can help you overcome any of them: Track your progress and check in with yourself regularly.
The previous post in this series, “Constructing Routines to Support Your Goals,” can help you create habits, schedules, and steps that will become your roadmap to accomplishing everything you want to do in 2024. But it’s only by tracking and analyzing your progress that you can ensure the routines you’ve built continue to serve you.
Ask yourself these 3 questions:
- How will you track your goals?
- How frequently will you check in with yourself?
- If you have not done what you set out to do, how will you adjust/react?
I track my goals using a pretty involved spreadsheet that I build around New Year’s each year.
This may not be your style. You don’t have to build an intense spreadsheet. Maybe you jot down notes in a journal or use your Fitbit to track your workouts. This is just one way of doing it that works for me.
Check in with yourself
Each month, take stock of what you’ve accomplished and celebrate your victories.
If you have not achieved all your goals, that’s okay. Practice self-compassion. If you were out sick for a week and didn’t go to the gym, congratulate yourself for learning the lessons of the pandemic and staying home when you’re sick. Then, adjust your goals and your schedule to where you ARE NOW, not where you hoped to be.
Approach your failures with curiosity. Why didn’t you achieve your goals? What change in your routine might make you more likely to achieve them? Maybe you planned to get up early every morning to work out, but you hate getting up early and keep skipping. So that routine isn’t working for you—try going in the evening. Maybe your goal of writing a short story over the course of the week felt overwhelming, so you kept avoiding it. Instead, try writing one scene each day.
Or maybe you didn’t accomplish a goal because you and your partner decided to take a last-minute trip to France. That’s a great reason not to accomplish a goal! The difference between a routine and a rut is knowing when to break free of it. Your routines are a tool to make it easier to achieve your goals. They’re meant to support you, not rule over you like the robots soon will.
A final reminder
My last piece of advice: Remember that failure is an option.
Failure means your goals were ambitious. If you never fail to reach your goals, it means you have yet to reach your limits! You don’t even know what you might be capable of accomplishing. Reach further and you might surprise yourself. Be Boundless!
