Setting goals when your follow-through is terrible

I make AWESOME plans.

I can plan the heck out of anything.  Give me a goal and I’ll tell you how to get there.

I’ll ask the right questions, give practical help, and make it look pretty.

I can even do all of that for myself.

Just don’t ask me to execute them.  Execution & I are decidedly not friends.

Can you relate?

At the beginning of every new calendar year and every new school year, I struggle with the emotions of being an execution failure.  And each summer.  Basically, any time I see people making plans that I know they’ll actually execute.   How can I be so good at planning things but fail so miserably at follow through?  At 43, shouldn’t I have this figured out?  

But I don’t.  I don’t know why other people can set plans and easily execute them.

However.

I have learned a few tricks that help me.  And maybe they’ll help you, too.

RELATED Word of the Year/New Year’s Goals for 2019

4 Tips for Setting Goals You Can Actually Follow Through On

1. It’s okay to have a long-term vision but keep your goals short-term.  Do you want to lose weight this year?  Great.  But don’t set some big number that is going to take all year to see come to fruition.  Even if you get started now, you’re likely going to lose motivation along the way especially if the weight isn’t coming off the way you had planned.

Instead, set your vision at ending the year thinner than you are now.  And set your short-term goals as ones you can control.  You’ll eat at least two more servings of fruits/veggies every day this month.  You’ll go for a walk three times a week for the next eight weeks.  You can’t control how your body reacts to your efforts but you can control your efforts.

2. Keep your goals achievable.   Let’s be honest.  If you are the type who isn’t great at following through on all those plans you make, this year you aren’t suddenly going to be perfect at it.  If you currently only eat a serving of veggies/fruit a day (and, yeah, some days that’s me), then you aren’t likely to maintain eating five servings a day every day from January 1 until December 31. 

But what if you eat one more a day this month?  Or one more a week?  Then, next month, you add one more.  And one more.  If you added just five more a week (see, I’m even adding in a buffer!), that’s more than 250 more servings by the end of the year than you would have eaten!

Do you want to have a summer that includes more outings, more fun, or less screens?  Fantastic.  But don’t set yourself up for failure.  You very likely aren’t going to make it to the park every day or complete all those cute activities you saw on Pinterest.  So pick one park a week.  Choose six of those cutesy pins that actually seem achievable for you.

3. Plan for failure.  I’m currently working on a project that I hoped to launch this week.  But that’s not going to happen.  And I knew there was a good chance of that, so I kept my plans flexible so that I wouldn’t feel like quitting just because my plans were executable on the day I wanted to be ready. {More on that project in the coming weeks!}

Remember above where I added in a buffer for eating more fruits/veggies?  Some days things are just going to go wrong.  A kid is throwing up on grocery shopping day, something comes up and you end up eating fast-food for two meals.  “Well, there goes that extra serving of produce, I might as well eat that ‘serving’ in French fries.”

I’ve been there!

But if I planned to not be successful every day?  Then it’s okay that I wasn’t perfect today.  It doesn’t say anything about me.  Not throwing up my hands and eating that extra serving of French fries, though, is progress.   Old habits didn’t come back. I didn’t tell myself that if only I had planned better, I wouldn’t be in this position.  I wouldn’t call myself a failure.  No, I’m accepting myself for who I am.

4. Be S.M.A.R.T.  When I am ready to write my goals, I keep the S.M.A.R.T. method in mind.  {Ignore that this video is for tweens…it does a great job explaining them!}  Writing goals with this method means you keep them specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and timely.   And you see that reflected in my other tips, ones I honed before I came across this type of goal setting! {See, I told you I can make great goals!}