How to Stick to your 2020 Goals

Every year, millions of people, if not billions, come up with New Year's resolutions to follow for the year to come.  Some are successful, many are not.  What are the keys to keeping your goals and achieving them? Stay tuned to find out.

Here are our top 4 tips for sticking to your goals

1) Have Short-Term Goals as well as your long-term goal

It's great to say that I want to "run a marathon", but unless you have shorter term goals to help you achieve that larger goal, it's really easy to miss the mark. You either run the marathon or you don't.  A better approach might be:

 - I want to run a marathon (Larger Goal)

How I'm going to achieve this is by:

 - Training 3-5 days a week for the next 4 months

 - Run a 5 km run several days in a row

 - Run a 10km run (so on and so forth)

 - Register for the marathon ahead of time

 - Find a program or hire a coach to help me improve my time

Theses are all shorter term goals that contribute to the larger goal at play and the added benefit is that as you focus on these smaller goals, it gives you a sense of achievement that fuels you towards maintaining the course for that larger goal.

2) Set yourself up for success

As Mark discusses in the video, it's not just about the goal that you are trying to accomplish.  It's considering all of the factors that contribute to you being able to accomplish that goal or not.  If you want to workout 156 times in a year, it's important to make sure you are:

 - getting adequate sleep

 - giving yourself rest days

 - proper nutrition

 - a plan of how to achieve it.

3) Set a reward

Let's face it, when it comes to setting goals, we are all like toddlers.  We like getting a reward for our efforts and this is a crucial part of being successful.  If the reward is simply that you did the task, most people won't follow through because the payoff doesn't outweigh the effort.  This is similar to the long term and short term.  Set a short term reward system as well as a long term. If your goal is say to: lose 150lbs, maybe a great short term reward would be to have a cheat day once a month. A great long-term reward would be that when you reach your goal, you'll book a trip to a tropical vacation so that you can show off your new beach bod. Knowing that you have something to look forward to as a reward, helps to propel you towards successfully following through.

4) Keep yourself accountable

If you make your goal public, it's easily to stay the course.  If you know that friends, family and coworkers are going to keep you accountable to your goal, it helps to keep you on track because you're not just letting yourself down but you're letting them down as well.

We hope that this was helpful. Let us know what other things help you to set goals and stick to them.