2021: goals and expectations
The criteria in goal setting — things you should avoid and things you need to do to accomplish them.
Here we are; January 2021 — aka the month of planning, goal setting, and “this year will be my year” attitude. As many of you would have already written down your goals and resolutions for 2021, I would like to share a couple of things I realized reflecting on previous ones.
After reflecting on the 2020 resolutions, I realized that I did not accomplish many things on that list. Before you jump to conclusions and characterize me with the forbidden word — you know that one word that many of us hate and starts with f. I would like to tell you the reasons why this happened.
Trying to find what went wrong, my first thought was — what every person on this planet used as an excuse last year — the pandemic! The reason why my goals were unfulfilled is that Covid–19 ruined everyone’s plans. Come on, admit it. You used it as an excuse, too. Well, that is the easy thing to do; and everyone that knows me knows that I despise doing things the easy way.
That led me to question myself, my goals, and why I couldn’t achieve them. Of course, the pandemic ruined some plans but not all of them. After some thinking, I managed to break down the problem into two smaller ones: setting unrealistic resolutions and not working enough towards those resolutions. Let me analyze them further.
At the begging of the year, the excitement of having a full year to achieve my resolutions and be closer to having the life I have always dreamt of is high. Which led me to set goals and expectations for 2020 that were unrealistic. In the end, there is only a certain amount of things a person can do in a year. For example, 2021 is not the year to set as a goal to travel the whole wide world and visit at least fifteen countries. During the pandemic: a) it is not the safest thing to do, and b) the cost of that would be huge. Unless you are a millionaire with a private jet, who could safely travel even during a pandemic, do not do it. What I want to say is that, after writing something down as a resolution, we should ask ourselves things such as:
Is that something that I can achieve in a year or I need more time — maybe that goal is something achievable in two or three years, do I have the capability of achieving that, or I have to rethink it, etc.
Having unrealistic goals and expectations can lead you to disappointment and stop working towards them or give them up. I talk from experience here; trust me! But even if the goal is realistic, you can lose motive. One of the main reasons that lack of motivation exists is procrastination. I am not saying that you should stop procrastinating because it is unrealistic. But you can try to be more disciplined. Something I think when I procrastinate to help motivate me is:
If I keep putting things off now, tomorrow will be worse cause more things will pile up.
Another reason is impatience — the need to see results and see them now. If I am working on a project and it takes more than a few days to see results coming, most of the time, I am impatient to wait, so I lose interest in it. That is something I plan to work on during this year because, as they say, good things take time.
As a takeaway from this post, take a moment to reflect on your 2021 resolutions, check if they are realistic. And if they are, keep yourself accountable for achieving them. As always, see you in my next post. Until then, I would love to read your opinion or experience on this topic in the comment section.
Love, Mal
P.S. If you didn’t guess what the forbidden word is, I want to inform you that it is… failure, also congratulate you on having the right approach towards it. Why did I call it the forbidden word? I can analyze it in my next post.
