How to stay motivated over time
This is about how to make your goals stick, stay motivated and achieve results in a way that’s sustainable.
I originally wrote this in my newsletter so in this post, I’m talking about new year’s resolutions. However, the advice is certainly useful year-round!
It is now that wonderful time of year that every gym and yoga course is booked out, that everyone is on a diet, and each of us is walking around holding our head a little higher, full of new goals and ideas for a better tomorrow…
But… in about five weeks, most of these goals will be forgotten, you will be eating bread again, and your head will come back to rest squarely on your shoulders.
At least that’s the way it normally goes and that’s the reason most people say that new year’s resolutions don’t work. I don’t agree with those people.
I for one love new year’s resolutions. I think they can be very useful and I love this time where many people are talking about how they want to improve their lives.
You just need to understand a few basic truths about goal-setting and creating habits that last:
START SMALL: You are new to running and your goal is to go running three times a week? That’s too much. Try setting the goal to go once a week. It’s much easier to achieve and the fact that you are managing to stick at it will give you the motivation you need to keep it up over time. You can still go for an extra run when you can manage and then enjoy the extra happiness that comes from outperforming your own expectations!
TINY HABITS: You want to eat more healthily? Changing your diet completely overnight is difficult and most people find it difficult to stick at it for very long. Better: replace one thing at a time. Your afternoon caffe latte? Replace it with green tea. Then, if that’s easy, switch out something else the week after.
PIGGYBACK ROUTINES: Want to do a meditation every morning? Try to combine it with a different habit that you do every morning so the two become an automatic routine. I do my meditation every morning between getting dressed and putting on my makeup. This sequence is always the same so there’s no danger of me forgetting it. What’s even better is that I don’t need to go and find the motivation to do it every single day, I just do it as naturally as I brush my teeth.
EMBRACE IRREGULARITY: Before you even start, remember that there will be days/weeks where something gets in your way or you have a lapse in willpower and don’t manage to honour your goal. Don’t think of this as failure. It is natural that things get in the way and that your priorities shift from time to time. The important thing is to not let one skipped run, one blueberry muffin, one forgotten meditation kill your motivation in a way that makes you feel bad and miss the next one. Tomorrow is a new day. Just start over. It’s fine.
Hope this was useful. And I’d love to hear what your new year’s resolutions are if you have any!
PS: Yes, in case you’re wondering: the title image is one of the countless to-do-lists I worked through when I was launching EDGY. That’s a good example of a project that would overwhelm you completely if you wanted to tackle it as a whole… the only way to get something like that done is to break it down into the thousands of tiny steps that it’s made of and START SMALL.
EDGY vocabulary from this blog post:
rest squarely on something = this means it sits there very firmly, right in the middle
new year’s resolutions = the goals you make for the new year
I for one = this means it’s just my personal opinion
habit = things you do regularly as part of your routine
stick at it / stick to it = that you manage to keep doing it even if it’s difficult
keep it up = to continue doing something at the same level over time
piggyback = this is when you give someone a ride on your back like a baby koala (usually a child)
embrace = to welcome something happily with open arms
a lapse in something = when you temporarily don’t manage something you normally manage
