3 Tips to Achieve 2016 Goals
Follow These Three Tips to Achieve Your 2016 Goals
With the start of the new year, whether you have goals and objectives for personal development or business, achieving goals boils down to your daily habits, behaviors, and mindset. If you do the following research based tips on a regular basis, you will stay focused to achieve what is important to you in 2016.
1. Write down your goals – Research by David Kohl from Virginia Tech reports that if you write down your goals, you are nine times more likely to achieve your goals. Interestingly, only 20% of people have goals and of those 20%, only 10% write them down!
2. Imagine yourself taking action – According to Heidi Grant Halvorson in her book Succeed, it is better to visualize in your mind’s eye the steps needed to achieve your goal rather than visualizing your desired outcome. Despite many claims that if you visualize your end result it will happen, research shows this is not true. Instead, by focusing on what you need to do to get to your goal, you will plan and prepare more which results in achieving your goal.
3. Adopt a growth mindset – Mindset is the game changer between those who succeed and those who stay stagnant. It boils down to the mindset of believing you can learn when faced with setbacks. Carol Dweck’s book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success describes the research behind having a growth mindset vs. a fixed mindset as follows:
- Growth – Believe you can learn with effort and persistence. When you hit a setback (which happens with all new learning), try new strategies and step by step you will figure out what works and what doesn’t. The key is not giving up and the willingness to adopt different approaches based on what didn’t work.
- Fixed – Believe you can’t learn new things and give up when things are hard. When your inner critic is on overdrive and sending you thoughts about your incompetency and you believe those thoughts, you are in a fixed mindset.
We are all a combination of both growth and fixed mindsets, the key is which one we dwell on. While effort is important with a growth mindset, if we keep doing the same thing over and over and not getting the results we want, we need to be willing to try new strategies. Both the willingness to keep trying different strategies along with effort prevents slipping into a fixed mindset.