3 Steps to REALLY Achieve Your Goals

Increase Your Odds of Goal Achievement by 70%

We are approaching late January.  Usually, this is when people start losing their steam when it comes to making change and achieving their goal. The weekend is here, it’s hard to keep eating well, getting up and meditating,  or whatever your resolution was. There is a reason why New Year’s Resolutions don’t stick. It gets hard! Hard things deter people. I work with people who are ready to make change – and here are my 3 pieces of advice to stick to those resolutions for making your life better.

1. Realize that true change takes an average of 66 days.

Have you ever heard that it takes 21 days to make or break a habit? Guess what? That’s wrong. That “fact” was assumed by Dr. Maxwell Maltz, a doctor who observed that after removing people’s limbs, it took about 21 days for the phantom pain to disappear.   While Dr. Maltz created important and interesting work, the 21 day theory was never put to any sort of scientific test until Phillipa Lally conducted an in-depth study on habit formation in 2010.  She found that it can take some people up to 256 days to create or break a habit.  Don’t despair though – it takes an average of 66 days.   So give yourself a good two months.  I like the idea of 80 days.  It seems like a nice doable number.

2.  Share your change goal with someone.

If you are keeping your resolution to yourself, rethink that.  A Dominican University Study on strategies for achieving goals and resolutions found that sharing your goal with someone increases your chances of achievement.  Furthermore, if you share a weekly update on how you are doing – you increase your chances of achievement to 70%.  So basically, if you find an accountability partner (fancy word for someone who will call you on your flakiness) you will go from a 35% chance of success to 70%.  I’ll take those odds.  I hope you do too.

3.  Write it down as if it already happened.

This sounds weird.  Writing down your goal increases the likelihood of obtaining that goal.  We know this!  It’s scientifically proven.  Dr. Gail Matthews’ study  proved that if you write down your goal and go a step further – write down your action to achieve the goal – you further increase your chances of achievement.

I suggest writing down your goal as if it already happened.  You already did it!  For instance:  I eat clean.  I own my own business.  I am organized.  Whatever your goal is – write it as if it already happened.  Then write down what you will do that day to achieve that goal.  As a result, both sides of your brain will actually process this image of change, and it will become encoded into your brain.  Your hippocampus will analyze this information.  What this means for you is that you have a higher likelihood of remembering and acting on the steps it takes to achieve your goal.

Finally – I want to encourage you to keep on going.  You are still in a fresh, new year.  Anything in possible by the end of the year, and if you stick with whatever your goal is, imagine what you could do if you leveled up.  What could you achieve in two years?  In five?

In conclusion – cheers to a great weekend and to a promising 2019.