3 Critical Goal Setting Strategies To Achieve Your New Year's Resolutions

It's a new year, and the time when most people promise to change their bad ways and habits in the coming year. In reality, New Year's resolutions are nothing more than an exercise in goal setting. While those making resolutions are sincere in their desire for change, the sad fact is that most of these goals will not be met. But there is help. What follows are 3 very simple yet critical goal setting strategies that will help you avoid failure in reaching your goals this coming year.

First and foremost, goals must be very specific and in a definitive time frame. Goals such as losing weight, stopping smoking, or making more money in the coming year are far too general and bound to fail. In addition, setting long-term goals without breaking them down in to smaller, more manageable steps more often than not result in failure. Instead of having a goal to lose weight in the coming year, a more appropriate strategy would be to set weekly and monthly weight loss goals. For example, if my goal were to lose 50 pounds by next January, I would set monthly goals of losing 4 pounds per month, or more succinctly a weight loss of 1 pound per week. These smaller goals are much more easily met than loftier yearly resolutions.

The second strategy focuses on accountability. For any resolution to be successful, there must be some measure of accountability, or a feeling of taking responsibility for the success or failure of that goal. Most people are only accountable to themselves, and this rarely works in goal setting. A strategy that I have successfully used for the past year is that of an accountability partner or "running buddy," a person that you are accountable to in working towards your goals. This strategy is crucial to achieving goals and has been instrumental in my losing 65 pounds last year. I was accountable to my wife, who was also trying to lose weight. By holding each other accountable, this served as a strong support system for achieving our short- and long-term goals.

If you do not have someone close by to serve as your accountability partner, there are other options, including the Internet. Another goal I set last year was that of achieving financial freedom through my home business opportunity. In order to achieve this, I needed someone who was in a similar business situation as I with the same goals. I found this person through the Internet. By using Google Documents, email, and the telephone we kept each other accountable to our monthly, weekly, and even daily activities and made great strides towards our long-term goals. This relationship has been mutually beneficial for both of us, and we continue to be accountability partners or running buddies to this day.

The third and final strategy for successful goal setting involves limiting distractions. There are numerous sources of distraction that can chip away at our productivity on a daily basis. Email messages, phone calls, non-essential webinars and training calls, and meaningless meetings all serve to distract us from our goals. You must put a system in place to limit these distractions. Personally, I only check email messages twice per day (in the morning and evening), screen my phone calls, and am very selective as to which training calls and webinars I attend. This allows me to focus all of my energies on achieving my daily activities that contribute towards realizing my long-term goals.

The setting of goals each January is ubiquitous throughout the world, yet in general less than 10% of people actually realize these goals, most having lost their drive by the end of January. The reason for this high degree of failure usually lies in the lack of definitive goal setting strategies. Using more specific goals of shorter duration combined with sharing accountability with another person and limiting unnecessary distractions will dramatically increase your chances of achieving your goals. And best of all, you'll dramatically improve your self confidence and overall quality of life when you succeed in meeting your goals and aspirations.