It’s the start of the year so you know what that means, its time for New Years Resolutions! The start of the year always seems to be a time of resetting and looking to the year ahead and thinking about changes you’d like to make or things you’d like to achieve. And we all set out with the best of intentions don’t we, but for some of us, myself included, those resolutions quickly fall by the wayside and are left for another year.
Why do our new years resolutions often fail?
Sometimes those resolutions aren’t achieved because they are too broad. I am definitely guilty of this. One year I said “this is the year I am going to learn a new language”, and then proceeded to try and learn Spanish and would use the Duolingo app maybe a couple of times a week. But then I was going to Portugal more so thought maybe it would be more practical to start learning Portuguese, and you know what while we’re making a list wouldn’t it be great to be able to speak German one day too. So, as you can imagine that resolution was never achieved and sadly I cannot speak any of those languages…yet!
Not only was my resolution too broad but another downfall a lot of people come across with goal setting is whether it is achievable and realistic. For me, it was not realistic that I would be able to learn 3 new languages in a year so I was setting myself up to fail before I even started. And when we unintentionally set ourselves up to fail, it doesn’t feel very nice and it certainly isn’t motivating to try it again.
So, how can we better set resolutions for ourselves this new year?
Well the first thing we can do is make them SMART.
SMART is an acronym which stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timebound. This method was originally created in 1981 by George Doran to be used by management teams in setting organisational objectives. Since then, this method is used across many industries including healthcare to help set and achieve goals.
Alongside making our goals SMART we might also want to split them into short and long term goals. Quite often we set a long term goal that can feel so far out of reach and maybe unachievable but if we broke it down into bite sized short term goals we are more likely to work our way towards achieving it.
Let’s practice setting some goals together.
For this example, lets set a running goal for someone who has never run before.
Example goal: “Run a 10km race.”
Is this goal SMART? Well, its specific in that it refers to running 10km in a race but other than that it is not very SMART. Let’s change that.
SMART goal: “Run the Wimbledon 10km race in November 2025 with a time of 1 hour 15 minutes”
This goal is now specific (running race, location), measurable (distance and time), achievable (it gives this person 11 months to go from no running to running 10km and the time is aimed at a beginner runner), relevant (this person wants to start running), and timebound (distance, time and date).
We’ve now got our SMART goal but we can’t expect this person to not run for 11 months and then suddenly compete in a 10km race, so its more of a long term goal at the moment. So, what SMART short term goals could we make?
Example short term goals:
“Start the couch to 5km challenge in January and complete within 9 weeks”
“Run 1 x 2km and 1 x 5km runs a week for 8 weeks”
“Run 2 x 5km runs a week for 10 weeks”
“Continue with weekly running routine and aim for one of the 5km runs to be under 30 minutes and one under 35 minutes”
Before you know it, this person has completed all of their short term goals along the way and has made it to their race in November completing their SMART goal they set back in January. So, this New Year when setting those New Years Resolutions make sure to make them SMART and please share those SMART goals with us so we can support you along the way!
Happy New Year all and happy goal setting!