By Justice Westmoreland
February 11, 2019
Can you believe that we are already five weeks into 2019? Where did the time go? In this article, I hope to inspire you to take on challenges this year and motivate you to knock down challenges that you may face throughout the rest of this year. By setting challenging goals, you are allowing yourself to grow and giving yourself dreams to reach for in the new year.
Make Your Goals Specific In order to successfully meet your goals, it is important that you have an idea of what exactly that goal is. Your goal should be specific to your ambitions and what you hope to accomplish overall. I decided that I wanted to maintain a healthier lifestyle this year after gaining my freshman fifteen last semester. In order to make this goal more realistic, I broke it down into smaller steps. For example, I have no eating out for a month and no sugar for a month as two of my goals.
Make Your Goals Attainable One of the common mistakes we make when creating goals is that we only imagine ourselves succeeding and we do not necessarily picture ourselves failing or facing challenges. Due to this, it is extremely important that we make our goals attainable and realistic. For instance, I decided that I would save at least $2,000 for my future home this year. First, I took into account my average income and deducted my current expenses. Next, I made this goal flexible enough to be attainable by making a list of things I wanted to save up for. The house, of course, required a lot more saving than the rest of my goals. Lastly, I made a budget for all of my current expenses in order to meet this goal.
Make Your Goals Measurable In order to stay consistent while striving to succeed your goals, it is important to make sure they are measurable. This is immensely important when it comes to determining whether you met that goal or not. For instance, one of my goals is to do yoga every single day for the entire year. This means that if I do not do yoga 365 times this year, I will not reach my goal. Instead of writing something like, “stop eating out as much as I typically do,” you might want to try writing, “eat at least six home cooked meals each week.”
Make Your Goals Rewarding When cultivating your list of goals, it is extremely important to ensure that those goals will be rewarding to you in the future. I always try to envision the way that the particular goal will make me feel, the ways that the certain goal will change my life, and how my goal can help myself and others around me. When making your goal, do you see a better future for yourself? If not, this goal is probably not going to be rewarding in the ways that you need it to be.
Make Your Goals Trackable
Lastly, it is important to make your goal trackable. This simply means that your goal should have a date or time that it should be accomplished by. For instance, one of my goals is to maintain a 4.0 GPA throughout spring and fall semester. This goal is trackable since I have given it a specific timeframe. A lot of the time, I will even make smaller goals trackable. When I have an assignment due on a certain day, I will always make a goal to have it done three days in advance if time allows. In other words, if I have an assignment due for Psychology on Friday, I will make a goal to have the assignment finished by Tuesday.
I hope that I have been able to help you set a few goals for the year that we have ahead of us. Setting goals can be challenging, but the future you will thank you for it!
The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Infuse Student Media or Southwest Baptist University.
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