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Good morning, friends and Uncommoners! Today we start the last full week of January 2010, and I have just one question for you: have you made progress toward your goals?
While it might seem a bit harping for me to pose this question to you, only three short weeks after the start of the new year and the establishment of those goals, frequent check-ins on goal progress is essential to success.
Goal-setting guru and noted psychologist Edwin Locke published a groundbreaking study in 1968 on the fundamentals for successful goal setting and achievement. In this study, he and his team noted that goal achievement was almost 90% more likely when participants felt a sense of progress toward their aim and received regular feedback from superiors.
Since you don’t have a team of psychologists or superiors providing feedback and progress reports to you as you work toward your Uncommon goals, you need to fill that role yourself. And you need to perform that role often.
When you don’t regularly check in with yourself on how you are succeeding in your goals, two things often happen: 1) you don’t move forward (at least not at the rate you’re capable of), and 2) your goal loses importance/attention/focus because you forget about it or it gets replaced with a more immediate problem.
People often ask me how frequently they should review their progress toward their goals, and unfortunately there is not a one size fits all answer for that question. Weight loss, for example, cannot be gauged on a daily basis as it is a cumulative result. However, eating well and to promote weight loss is something that can be checked in on a daily basis.
Regardless of what individual goals may require for checking in, I like using the monthly check in because 4 weeks is a sufficient amount of time for progress to be made, but not so much time as to be a problem if you find yourself severely off course.
In my opinion, the one month check in after setting any goal is the most important as it can save your goals from New Year’s Resolution syndrome (NYS). NYS occurs when you get all excited to achieve a goal a the new year, and then by week 3 it is back to business as usual and all efforts toward the goal have been dropped. The first month is the hardest part where your goal is really made or broken, so checking in before that point is key to pushing through and fighting off NYS.
So, with just one week left in the first month of 2010, I ask you: how are you progressing toward your goals?
Some questions to ask yourself today as you reflect on this question include:
- What have you achieved toward your goals so far (small things, like joining a gym, buying a domain name, or cleaning out a closet count!)
- What are you pleased with in terms of your progress?
- What actions do you see yourself taking tomorrow, this coming week, and in February to keep going?
- What do you wish you had been able to do better this past month?
- What can you do to improve your potential for success tomorrow, this coming week, and in February?
- What do you need to keep moving forward?
If you aren’t where you had hoped to be at this time of the month, don’t despair – you are here, you are thinking about it, and you have it in your control to take positive and proactive measures to get somewhere better by this time next month.
Remember, goal achievement is a journey. Your journey may take a little longer than expected, or you might end up in wonderful places you never dreamed of going. Just keep your eyes and mind open to opportunity, and your heart open to gratitude, and you will reach all of your goals – I believe in you!
Here’s to your Uncommon Life – and a killer last week of January!
