4 weeks to go

With only 4 weeks to go until the end of the year and the start of a brand new one, it’s easy to wind down and not worry too much about your life goals until next year.

And millions of people round the world take this approach, and then use New Year’s Day as a fresh start to a new year and as the trigger to evaluate their lives and where it’s all heading.

The problem is, most goals set on New Year’s Day are reactionary – “Gee, I wish I didn’t eat so much at Christmas. I’m really going to lose weight this year.” Or “We spent way too much on Christmas presents. This year we’re really going to get our finances in order”. Do any of these sound familiar?

Of course, reactionary or ‘guilt’ based goals really don’t work because the feeling of guilt and the length of the ‘reaction’ actually don’t last very long so your desire to achieve these goals disappears as well – usually by the end of January.

But there is something refreshing about starting a year a-new, and New Years Resolutions are still the most popular way to do it. So I thought we’d get in early and start you all thinking about your goals NOW so you can make your New Year Resolutions count.

Why start now? Well, thinking about your life direction and setting these important goals takes time and it isn’t easy to do it all on one day, particularly if you’re a little hung over from the night before!

So for the next 4 weeks, we’ll be arming you with the resources and tools to get your mind around your goals and what you really want to achieve from you life, so that on New Year’s Day, you can hit the ground running with real goals that are based on your understanding of what you really want to achieve - goals that are meaningful to you and goals that you have a genuine desire and passion to want to achieve.

Of course, it’s important to realise that New Year resolutions aren’t the only chance you’ve got to set yourself goals. Birthdays, seasons, the start of the month and even every Monday are all great times to set goals. In fact, you can actually set goals anytime you like! Any epiphany will do!

Now to get you started, I recommend that you try one of the following FREE resources on how to set and achieve goals.

• The Life Planning Program is a workbook style program that you can work through at your own pace, and is supported by practical tools, templates and assessments – which are all FREE!
• Goal Setting E-Course: Foundations and Keystones – this course helps you work through the foundations and keystones of the goal setting process by helping you understand what’s really important to you and how YOU influence your own goal setting destiny. This course is great for goal setting beginners!
• Goal Setting E-Course: Making your Roadmap to success – this course is a natural progression from the Goal Setting Foundations E-Course and helps you turn these strong foundations into achievable goals through the effective and proven process of SMART goal setting and action planning.
• Mini goal setting E-course – this is a shorter version of the above 2 courses rolled into one simple E-course. This course is great if you already have some goal setting experience under your belt and understand the basics of the goal setting process. The course refreshes the most important parts of the goal setting process, so you don’t lose your way.

These E-courses and the workbook are all based on the same concept of understanding yourself first, before you can understand what goals you really want to achieve. We’ve had some extremely positive feedback from the workbook (the e-courses are based on the workbook) so please give it a go. And it’s FREE.

Here’s another FREE e-book on goal setting from Arina Nikitina.

We’ll be issuing the next Goal Kicker edition in this NYR Count Down Series next week, so before then I just ask you to think about what you really want to achieve from your life.

Think about when you’re on your death bed, how do you want your life to be remembered? How do you want YOU to be remembered? What achievements do you want to have achieved? And more importantly, think about what makes you happy. When are you at your happiest and what are you doing? What is your passion?

All of these are fundamental in enabling you to set the goals that are going to be best for you, and these goals are the ones you should be setting yourself now and for the New Year.

So until next week, happy thoughts and dreams. Let see if we can help you achieve them.