Hey Everyone!

Hope you’re all doing well!

If you’re anything like me, as New Year’s approaches, you get excited and come up with at least a few New Year’s resolutions but soon after the New Year you give up on or forget about your New Years resolutions.

If you think about it, New Years resolutions are like goals that we set up for ourselves and of course, our goals are whatever we are trying to accomplish.

It is very important that we never give up on setting goals for ourselves because psychological studies have shown that people who set goals for themselves perform better on tasks in comparison to people who have not set goals for themselves.

Setting goals can definitely lead to improved performance but only if we set the right type of goals. In order to be effective, each goal has to be moderately difficult, specific, and in harmony with your own needs and desires.

Make Sure Your Goals are Moderately Difficult

As you have probably guessed, goal difficulty is based on how hard it is to accomplish the goal. Research has shown that the more difficult a goal is the better performance outcome it will likely have. The reason behind this is because more difficult goals require more effort and persistence. The more difficult the goal is the more effort you have to put into achieving it. Difficult goals also enable us to become persistent because we are motivated to keep working towards our goal and constantly putting effort into the goal until we finally achieve it.

Obviously, I believe that goals should be moderately (and reasonably difficult) for example, I, as someone who is pretty lazy and can barely climb a hill, should probably not count on climbing a mountain anytime too soon.

Make Sure You are Setting Specific Goals

It is also really important to set really specific goals that tell you exactly what you need to do. Let’s say that you have an upcoming exam and your goal is to simply study a lot. It’s a great goal to have but its not a very specific goal because studying a lot can mean different things to different people. A better alternative would be to plan out the steps you need to do such as read the chapter, take notes, review the notes, etc. Specific goals are really helpful because they take away any ambiguity and help us focus our attention on what we need to do in order to reach our goal.

Set Goals that You Believe In:

Finally, when it comes to setting goals make sure that you are setting goals to accomplish things that you are genuinely interested in and/or things that you feel will truly improve your life. Do you want to lose weight? If you’re thinking about a future career do you want to be a doctor? When setting goals consciously ask yourself, do you really want to accomplish this task or is this something that society respects. Not everything that society respects is bad or wrong but we need to make sure that we preserve our own individuality as well!

Goal setting is such a huge topic and this is just the tip of the iceberg but I hope these tips are of some help to you the next time you want to set a goal!

With Love,

Yasmin