It’s the end of the semester, the holidays are upon us and you’re finishing up final exam week. The year of 2016 is almost over. In the midst of all the hustle and bustle of this semester, and this past summer and last spring, do you still remember your 2016 new year's resolutions? I don’t. I think they were something like get into shape, be more punctual...and something else. But if you did manage to actually remember your resolutions, did you achieve them? If you did, then you deserve a round of applause!
It’s pretty rare that people achieve their new year's resolutions. I don’t think it’s because the new pages we want to turn, the new standards we want to set for ourselves or the new experiences we want to have are unrealistic. I think it’s because we give ourselves an entire year to avoid doing them. It’s really not that most people are unrealistic about what they want to achieve, it’s that we set unrealistic time frames for ourselves to achieve them in. If you think about it, a year is actually a long time. A lot can happen in your life in a year. Your goals can change in 3 months, let alone in a year. It is possible to lose weight, eat better, raise your GPA, start a new hobby, spend more time with your family or friends, get a new job or get into grad school. The problem is, the deadline for completing all of these goals is next year. So now, you have an entire year to make up excuses or forget about them entirely.
Maybe your goal for this new year is that you really want to get all A’s each semester. A semester is around 16 weeks. So instead of setting the goal for the whole semester, try breaking down your goal into steps that need to be achieved within a few weeks. It’s easy to look at deadlines far in the future and take the time you have to complete them for granted. For example, at the beginning of a semester, you know there’s going to be a final exam. But are you already studying for it by the fourth week of the semester? Most likely the answer is no. It’s not because you don’t want to pass the final, it’s because it’s too far away for you to be thinking about it with everything else that’s going on in your life. The same thing can happen with goals that we set on a yearly basis.
Even better than setting goals this year, because most likely they are about the same every year, set steps and actions that you will take every few months to achieve them. What I’ve learned recently is the key to making change happen in your life, and the actual change you want to see, is by realizing 3 things:
- Setbacks are inevitable
- Take the setbacks as “red ink” to re-fine and re-define your goals
- Every 3 months set a new step to take towards your goal
The inevitable that we are all trying to avoid is going to happen. At some point we’re going to have setbacks or fail. You may have been eating super healthy all semester and feeling good about yourself, but then finals week hit and you spent two weeks eating Raman and Doritos, while you pulled all-nighters. It’s okay! The day after your last final is when you dust yourself off and pick up where you left off. Maybe a way you re-fine this goal during next semester is to have pre-planned or prepared healthy meals that you just need to heat up and snacks that are stocked in your fridge. It feels discouraging when we experience setbacks, but it’s tremendously more disappointing when we never get to the point of even experiencing one. Every year can be the year that you inch closer and closer towards your goals. Just ditch the new year's resolutions first.
