How To Stop Giving Up On Your Goals

Tis’ the season for our New Year’s resolutions to start to crumble.

It is said that the 3rd Monday in January, affectionately dubbed Blue Monday, is the most depressing day of the year. The holidays are over, credit card bills are arriving with new debt, the weather is cold, and many are failing at their New Year’s resolution as their motivation dwindles.

Have you been there? Determined this is a new year, new you, only to be back to the old you in a few weeks, ready to repeat the cycle next year?

Whether it is working out, improving your mental health, or finally taking the big leap into reaching your big dream goals, we all know the pain and shame that comes with jumping in headfirst toward a goal only to practically give up on it a few weeks later.

Usually, when this happens people believe that it is because they are lazy, bad, or that they suck. Not only is that unlikely to be true, but that type of thinking may subconsciously be keeping you stuck.

In all of the years that I have helped people reach their goals and with the personal experience I have in reaching my own dream goals, I have learned it is not who you are that is keeping you stuck. There is nothing inherently wrong with you. It is your mindset and your behaviors that are the root cause of this pattern and they just need some tweaks to get you back on the right path.

So don’t quit on those goals, use these tips to breathe new life into your motivation to reach them!

1. Break your goal up into small bite-size daily tasks.

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. It is the same for goals. When a goal is big, it can feel so overwhelming that it feels impossible to accomplish. This can cause you to freeze and not follow through or pursue it. Break your goal up into small daily tasks. Identify tangible tasks that will help you to achieve your goal. Add these tasks into your daily routine. This will help keep it fresh on your mind by making them a daily habit and will make the tasks so small they feel doable and easier to accomplish. For example, if you want to lose a certain amount of weight, you could break it up into daily tasks of tracking your food intake, staying in a healthy calorie deficit, drinking a certain amount of water, and getting a certain number of steps in daily.

2. Create short-term goals that allow you more wins, more often.

One of my coaches lost 100 pounds. The way he thought about it was that he didn’t lose 100 pounds, he lost 1 pound 100 times. Our brains love the chemical release that comes with experiencing a win. It feels good and encourages us to do it again. Creating goals that are short-term (that will lead to reaching the long-term goal) enables you to have wins more often, which will help keep you motivated. We can lose motivation when we are working hard to reach our goal but, the win is too far away. Instead of only measuring your success by whether or not you got to the end goal, measure your success by whether or not you are improving on taking consistent action to reach your long-term goal. If you want to overcome depression, a shorter goal may be increasing the consistency of taking your daily medication or improving on the consistency of using a coping skill to decrease the intensity of depression daily. Over time, the actions for your short-term goals will help you get to your long-term goal, but you won’t lose motivation in the process because you are experiencing motivating wins all along the way.

3. Track your progress.

One of the biggest mistakes people make when setting a goal is not tracking their progress. We can get so caught up in looking ahead at how much more we have to go, that we forget all we have accomplished already. Seeing our progress helps us to feel motivated to continue. Make sure you are tracking your progress in a way that actually helps you see your progress. For example, if your goal is to lose a certain number of pounds, you could track your weight, but also track the consistency of your workouts, how many calories you are eating and burning, and take before and after pictures. Sometimes, one way of tracking is not truly reflecting your progress. You may not have lost weight on the scale, but you may have improved in the consistency of exercising or eating right or you may look more toned. Tracking our progress can also help us see where we are going wrong. Once we can see where we are getting stuck, we can problem solve and fix it. For example, you may have a goal to lose weight but every Monday your weight is the same, despite eating right and exercising. Looking at what you tracked, you may notice you are losing two pounds between Monday and Thursday and then gaining it all back on the weekend. It is not that the whole plan is failing and you should give up, it is that you throw the plan out the window 3 out of 7 days a week. You just need to make some changes to the weekend to help you progress to the goal. Once you see that, you are more motivated and encouraged because all is not lost. Tracking your progress can help you see where you are going wrong and what is not working and how you can adapt or pivot. You won’t be able to properly assess and problem solve unless you keep track of your progress.

4. Have realistic expectations.

Unfortunately, it is unlikely you will reach your goal overnight. Many people give up too soon because their expectations are unrealistic. If things are not working as fast as you would like, don’t just give up, reassess your expectations of the work you need to put in and the results you get in return. Are you trying to do too much too fast? Are you expecting too much change for too little effort? Is your method not sustainable? Do you need to be more patient? Are you 4 running miles and then eating fast food and frustrated that you are not losing weight? Are you expecting to work 9 hours a day on your side hustle after working all day at your full-time job? Are you expecting to be cured of depression after 4 sessions of therapy? Unrealistic expectations don’t mean you should give up on your goal, you just need to approach it differently. Get that problem-solving hat on and rework your plan. Learn from what is not working and revamp. Have reasonable expectations for the work you can put in and for the result you will get in return. The more realistic you are, the more likely you will be motivated to stick to it and reach it.

5. Plan for obstacles.

Things will not go smoothly. You will have things popup that throw you off your routine. You may have days when you feel unmotivated. You may have days that you fall off the wagon. Expect that. Then get proactive. Decide ahead of time how you will deal with it when those things come up. If you have to work late and don’t have time to cook the low-calorie meal you planned, have a place in mind that you can go to that has a low-calorie meal that you can pick up or have a frozen healthy meal ready for such an occasion. Don’t think of obstacles as a permission slip to fall off the wagon for weeks. Get away from the all or nothing thinking that says you should do it perfectly or don’t do it at all. When an obstacle comes up and you stray from your plan because of it, that is okay. Make a better choice the very next chance you get.

You do not need to give up on your goals. Get back up on that horse. Revamp. Pivot. Try again using these tips.

Tell us in the comments how you will use these tips to reach your goals!