Three Ways to Set Goals for the New Year

It’s 2021, and at Corona Pointe Resort, we’re looking forward to a great year. Setting goals is on a lot of people’s minds, so we wanted to share three techniques to help you be successful. Check them out!

Be Aware of Self-Talk

A lot of people don’t like setting goals because they’ve failed to reach their goal in the past, and failure just doesn’t feel good! But adjusting the way you talk to yourself can make a huge difference.

“Not completing a goal can feel like a failure, but in truth, these setbacks are a part of long-term success,” according to Healthie . “Talking through the setbacks, and creating new goals to help address these underlying issues, will allow [you] to break down [your] barriers to change and create sustainable change.”

In other words, the way you talk to yourself can actually help you achieve your goals! For example, people might have a tendency to speak to themselves like this: “I’m never going to eat enough vegetables every day. It will always be too hard to make the time to prepare them.”

Instead, positive self-talk can be instrumental for people to keep working on their goals. Try something like this: “I’m not where I want to be yet. I’ve been struggling to get in all my servings of vegetables, but I’m working on it.” 

No matter what your goal is, speaking to yourself positively can help you achieve it.

Set Backwards Goals

Feeling overwhelmed when thinking about your ultimate goal? Try working backwards! 

PositivePsychology.com explains the technique this way: “With Backward Goal Setting, you start with your ultimate end goal (quite similar to traditional goal setting). But instead of thinking about what the first step might be, then the second, third and so on, you start at the end goal and work backward.”

Let’s say you’d love to save up enough money to travel around Europe for a year. You could get really discombobulated thinking about all the languages you should probably gain a basic knowledge of, all the money you need to save, all the paperwork you need to take care of, all the accommodation you need to find, and more. 

So instead, work backwards! Picture yourself happily staying with a nice family in Spain. Ahh, doesn’t that feel nice? What would you have to do to get there? Pack your bags. And before that, you will have to buy a plane ticket. Not only does backwards goal setting feel less stressful, but it also helps you stay focused. 

Write Them Down

Setting goals helps you take ownership over your life, especially when you write those goals down.

“When you set goals, you are saying ‘This is what I want to accomplish. This is what I’m going to do,’” says Thomas R. Harris at The Exceptional Skills . “You are stating what you want and doing something about it. You are taking responsibility for yourself.”

Let’s say you have a goal to do 10,000 push-ups by the end of the year, but you break your wrist in February, and doing traditional push-ups becomes impossible. Instead of giving up, you can simply amend your goal. Go to where you wrote it down, and change it to say that half of the push-ups can be one-armed or that you will be substituting lunges until your wrist heals. When you write something down, you have the power to change it and still make progress, no matter what challenge comes your way!

This year is going to be great as we are all aware of our self-talk, try setting backwards goals, and write down the things we want to accomplish. We can’t wait to see what you achieve this year!