4 tips to reaching goals in the new year
In this episode, I want to give you the 4 tips I use to reach your goals in the new year. It’s a pretty common thing for people to make New Year’s resolutions. Whether it’s losing weight, getting a new job, picking up a new skill, or learning an instrument or new language. There’s so many different things people want to do in the new year, but more often than not they quit soon after they start. So I want to give you the tips that I personally use on a daily basis to reach the goals that I’ve accomplished.
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Here’s the transcript from this podcast episode, please excuse any typos!
I’m going to start off with the first tip, which in my opinion, is something very easy that anybody can do. I don’t really have a name for it. So I’m going to call it the 515 3060 rule. What exactly does that mean? Well, in the new year, instead of putting a lot of pressure on yourself, to reach this, what might seem like an impossible goal. I want you to first think of four things that you want to accomplish in the new year. One is going to be small, one is going to be a little bigger but still small. One will be a little bit bigger, still somewhere medium sized. And then one big goal, okay? Don’t give yourself too many goals. They want you to make them like four different sizes, one that you do for five minutes a day. Let’s say learning a new language you can use the app called Duolingo. And literally these bite sized exercises that are about five minutes a day. You can easily learn a new language in five minutes a day. Now that doesn’t mean if you don’t want to keep going like say you’re enjoying it. You know I’ve been learning Portuguese on Duolingo like let’s say you want to keep going for 1015 20 minutes and you’re enjoying yourself. It doesn’t mean to stop after five minutes. It just means to make sure you do it every day for five minutes. Same goes for 15 minutes. Okay, so 15 minutes maybe you can learn a new instrument every day you pick up a guitar and for 15 minutes, you learn a couple of chords. You learn how to read sheet music, whatever it is, you pick up that guitar every day for 15 minutes. Say you’re trying to get in shape trying to lose some weight, but for 30 minutes every day, you should make sure you’re going for walks or exercising in some way. And make sure you do it every day. Don’t skip because once you skip, you start to get into this process of Oh, it’s okay. I skipped. I’ll do it the next day and then the next day you might get too busy and you’ll skip again. One of the things I really hardly ever do is I skip doing things because it can become a slippery slope. So don’t skip that 30 minutes per day. And then of course you have your 60 minutes. This is the one right, this is your goal. This is learning a new skill, you know, improving your job performance so you get a promotion. I’m saving up for a car, saving up for a house, a big goal of doing something large and you want to dedicate about 60 minutes per day if not more to improving yourself in this area. So if you’re learning a new skill, say you want to become a programmer or you want to become a construction worker, whatever it is. You dedicate yourself to learning everything you can about that for 60 minutes a day, one hour a day. And a lot of people say Oh, I don’t have time for any of these things. Okay, meanwhile, you’re flipping through Netflix, binge watching for eight hours. You can do an hour, 30 minutes, 15 minutes and five minutes, skip an episode of the show, and do that instead, you’ll feel much better. And to keep all of this organized.
Tip number two would be to create goal lists or task lists, priority lists, whatever you want to call them. And I’ve covered this in other episodes, but this is really important. I mean, everybody’s got a smartphone. You can easily make lists on your phone you want to do with the pen and paper and scratch them off. That’s fine too. But you need to make lists. And this goes for the 5 15 30 60 Minute ones all over. You want to make little lists for each one as to what you want to accomplish this week or this month. You want to knock those things off your list as you complete them by having a tangible list of your goals, micro goals, macro goals, small, large, etc. You are keeping yourself accountable. And as you look at that list every morning and say well yesterday, I knock these two off. Well I got 10 more to go. This keeps you accountable to keep knocking those things off your list. And as you knock them off one by one and you’re scratching them up. You’re gonna realize how much you’re accomplishing. You’re learning a lot, you’re better you know, you’re improving yourself. You’re reaching your goals slowly, but you’re reaching them because you’re knocking these things off your list. So those task lists, in my opinion, are super important.
Now, tip number three might seem obvious, common sense. But when I talk to entrepreneurs, we’re people in general who are embarking on these new goals, we’re trying new things. They don’t really do these things. And it’s pretty simple. Collaborating, right, reaching out to people on social media or friends and family. And the best two places to do this is going to be reddit.com and discord.com. Reddit is more of a message board where people post creative projects or they help you with tips and tricks and discord is more of a community of chat rooms where people can talk and collaborate on projects. If you find people like yourself on these two platforms, you’ll be able to find people who you can work with to bounce ideas off of help you through your task lists, and maybe even find a partner, a co-founder or something like that. Right. So it’s definitely easier to reach goals. When you have cheerleaders. When you have a group of people who are trying to reach the same goals that you are, it just makes it a lot easier because you know that you’re not alone. And when you need that extra push or you need that, you know positive feedback you’ll have. So I would suggest signing up for Reddit. Obviously you have all the other social media channels, Twitter and Facebook, etc. Reach out to people on all of them and just try to get people to support what you’re trying to do.
Tip number four. This one’s important, at least to me, this is probably the most important tip while you’re doing all the 515 3060s you’re writing down your task lists, you’re learning a lot, you’re knocking stuff off your lists, you’re collaborating with people and you’re going to be mentally exhausted, you’re going to be drained physically, mentally. So number four, you have to take breaks. You have to learn how to space out and this is why it’s 515 3060 So you do a five take a break. 15 take a break 30 Take a break 60 You guessed it, take a break. Every time you do one of these tasks. You should be taking a break whether it’s going for a walk, meditating, doing yoga, taking your dog for a walk or if you have a cat playing with your cat playing with your pet, whatever kind of pet you have taking a break. You can play a game, watch a movie, cook some food, get some coffee, go get some fresh air, go to the park, anything. Take a break that takes your mind off of the task you just accomplished. And also, not just taking breaks but celebrating wins. Let’s say you tackled one large task that had 10 different pieces on it that you knocked off in a month. Let’s say you know one of your smaller goals you reached in a month. Celebrate that win. Call up your friends and family. go out for dinner. If it’s pandemic time. Just have people on a FaceTime or Zoom call or invite one person over for a coffee that you trust who has been vaccinated and is in your social circle. Just celebrate your wins because you have to enjoy the fact that you achieve the goal. You got to feel good about it because if not, you’re just going to keep kind of moving along in this you know monotonous you know, path that doesn’t really improve your so you have to it’s a mental thing right as you’re improving as you’re reaching these goals, you have to also level up your mind a bit. So I think meditation is great. Yoga is a great walking exercise, like these things that help you kind of release everything from your mind and just kind of focus on being present. And enjoying the moments right being in the moment is very important. So there’s so many more tips I can give you guys but these are just some of the main ones that I think if you start using them in the new year, you will reach whatever goals you set for yourself. And I’d love to hear what goals you have and how you plan on achieving them, what tips you might have or tricks in the comments as usual. I always answer so I will see you guys all in next week’s episode but also next year’s episode.
