Given up on your New Year Resolutions? Good! Do this instead...
Ahhh the flurry of ‘New Year, New Me’. I’m a sucker for it. I love the possibility the new year brings, and the feeling of being refreshed and ready to take it all on.
We tell ourselves this year will be different. We tell ourselves we’ll finally focus on those health goals, once we’ve got work sorted. We try (and kudos to us for trying!), but within a week or a month, we’ve failed to stick to our New Years Resolutions.
We feel like we’ve failed, we don’t see the point, it’s another piece of evidence that we can’t stick to our goals. And so the cycle continues…
But now I’ve DITCHED the traditional list of ‘everything I’m going to do differently or change about myself this year’. And I think you should too. What’s the saying? ‘If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got.’ Come on guys it’s time to shake it up!
Let’s ditch the New Year’s Resolutions, and work on our self expectations instead.
Hear me out..
There are a few ways your self expectations can get in the way of you succeeding with your goals:
You have crushingly high self expectations, and a very critical inner dialogue (though you may not quite recognise that in yourself yet). So when you fail to meet those high expectations, you spiral into negative self talk and negative emotion which completely demotivates you and you give up.
In striving to meet your high self expectations and avoid feeling failure, you burn yourself out, so you have to stop working on your goals.
You’ve internalised the expectations of others, or you perceive people to have a certain expectation of you, which leads you to set goals that fundamentally, you don’t actually want to be doing. You’re not motivated to work on something that doesn’t ring true to you, so you don’t do them.
Sound familiar?
What understanding my self expectations did for me…
In 2019 I set one ‘goal’ for the year, which was to not set any goals. To not have any expectations of myself. I would do the things that got me out of my comfort zone and the things I enjoyed, without pressuring myself to achieve XYZ. Coincidentally, it was the year that I finally launched my blog and it was the year I signed up to Toastmasters public speaking group in July and went almost every week after that (consistency I do not usually display so readily!)
By spending time understanding my underlying self expectations; those that motivate me, those that were unhealthy and didn’t serve me, and those that had been limiting me without me even realising, I was able to start enjoying the process, rather than be crushed towards achieving an outcome.
It’s put me in a position to set goals for myself this year with a full belief that I’m mentally equipped to tackle them healthily and successfully, for the-first-time-ever. And it feels like total freedom!
What you can do now…
So before you start setting goals for yourself, spend some time understanding what self expectations are driving them. Ditch the goals, and download my FREE guide to understanding your self expectations instead.
In it I’ll help you to...
Uncover what expectations you have of yourself.
Investigate how the expectation is enabling you, or holding you back.
Decide whether to keep or adjust your expectation so it works for, rather than against, you.
And spend 2020 feeling like this…
Let’s do this!