174 3 Tips for Staying Consistent With Your New Goals

We're about 3 weeks into the new year...how are you feeling about your goals? In this episode, I want to share 3 tips to help you stay more consistent with your goals and/or habit changes you set at the new year in case you have fallen off the wagon.

The first thing to recognize is that it's completely normal if you're struggling with the intentions you set! I have good news friend, there is a very easy to way help you stay more consistent and I'm sharing it in this episode.

Tune in to:
1. Uncover the three tips you need to stay consistent with your 2021 goals.
2. Learn how to break down a goal into activities that you have control over.
3. Discover if your goal is actually meaningful to you, or if it is someone else's.

I would love to know what your goal is after you listen to this episode. DM it to me over on Instagram @megansumrell

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FULL TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00] Alright everyone, let's have a gut check here. How are you feeling about the goals you set for the new year? Today, I want to share with you three tips in case maybe you are feeling like you've fallen off the wagon a little bit. There's a reason why gyms, etc. Are packed in the new year and then about three, four weeks in, it starts to trickle out. 

[00:00:20] So if you are feeling that, listen up today because I'm going to give you three tips to help you stay more consistent with maybe some of those goals or habit changes that you wanted to set here in the new year. 

[00:00:34] Welcome to the Work + Life Harmony podcast. I'm your host, Megan Sumrell. I'm the creator of the top program and top planner, teaching all things time management, organization, and productivity for women. I'm also a mom and wife, and just like you juggling hashtags all the things while running multiple businesses and a family, guess what? You don't have to feel constantly overwhelmed, exhausted and stressed out. 

[00:00:55] There is another way. When you have the right systems and tools to plan and manage your time, you can live a life of harmony. This is your show to learn from me and other amazing women how to master your time, planning and organization. To skyrocket your productivity so you can have Work Life Harmony. If you're ready to stop feeling overwhelmed, this is the show for you. 

[00:01:15] And if you're new here, I'd love to get you started with my Work Life Harmony assessment. All you have to do is DM me on Instagram at Megan Sumrell with the word Harmony and my team will send it right over. 

[00:01:29] Hey. Welcome back to work life. Harmony. So here we are. We're about, what, three weeks into the new year, and this is typically where I start to see messages pouring in from people saying, I started off so great with some of the new goals and habits and all that that I set for the new year. 

[00:01:50] And now it's all starting to fall apart. So if this is you, first of all, guess what? This is 100% common. So first of all, know that you're not alone. Second of all, there's a very easy fix that you can put in place to help you stay more consistent with those new goals, habits, activities that you may have set up for yourself in the new year. 

[00:02:17] So this is what I want to dive in here today together, and I'm actually going to give you three tips that we're going to be breaking down here to help you stay more consistent with those goals. We're just going to use the term goals for today, but it may be a new habit, a new routine, an intention that you've set however you choose to view it. So let's break down three tips and then I'm going to walk through this together. So first and foremost, it is important for you to assess and make sure that you haven't bitten off more than you can chew. What do I mean by that? 

[00:02:55] Well, it is very easy for us sometimes, particularly at the start of a new year, to get really excited about the new things that we're going to do and we hear other people are doing it. Or in the back of our head we're thinking, oh, that doesn't seem like that much. And the goal that we have set for ourselves or goals are honestly a little bit more than what you can realistically continue and be sustainable. Now, I use health goals a lot just because it's an easy one to relate to. So for instance, maybe you set something and I'm going to go way unrealistic so you can understand what I mean. 

[00:03:32] But maybe you've decided you're feeling out of shape, all of that. This is the year you are going to run a marathon. You're never going to eat sugar again. You're going to cut out all carbs, and you're going to start learning about intermittent fasting. Okay, all of that. 

[00:03:48] And you say, January 1, I'm doing all of this. Guess what? That is way too much to embrace all at once. Particularly if you were someone that was completely opposite. Maybe you've never been running before. 

[00:04:00] You don't even know that much about intermittent fasting. Maybe you are someone that bakes a lot. And so the amount of change that you are trying to implement all at once is too much. All right, so this is what I mean by biting off more than you can chew. Now, a second flavor of biting off more than you can chew is not recognizing how much time you may need to make progress on this goal. 

[00:04:29] And the reality of your current life doesn't support that level of time. All right, so biting off more than we can chew comes in two flavors. It's either too much change all at once or you simply don't have the time available in your current schedule to do the things that you have set out to do. All right, so a good way to figure out if this is you and some changes that you can make. First of all, take an honest look at all the goals that you set for yourself for the year that you were starting on right now and ask yourself, how many do you have? 

[00:05:06] Because the number one tip I can give you is to start with one, one thing at a time, not five, six, seven. So back to that health goal. I said maybe. You said, I'm going to run a marathon, I'm never going to eat sugar, I'm going to cut out carbs, I'm going to do intermittent fasting. And you're trying to introduce all four of those at once. 

[00:05:25] I would say pick one. What is the one thing that you want to focus on until that feels natural and more like a routine that's sustainable in your life. Okay, so maybe you start with, I really am interested in running, so maybe the goal instead, what we're focusing on first and foremost is introducing a routine where you can start to run X days a week for 30 minutes a day or whatever it is that you lay out. And until that is becoming easy for you, don't try and tackle all of the other things at the same time. All right? 

[00:06:06] Now, if it is a time situation, this is why I can't stress enough the importance of integrating your plans around your goal into the realities of your life. And this is one of the things we do a deep dive on inside of my plan. We actually just did our Q One planning, and we spend a lot of time here because so many people and this is why I really hate it when I see people have a planner for their goal setting completely separate from whatever tool they're using to actually plan and manage their day to day life. Because if you go through this huge workbook and you're identifying what your goals and dreams are, you're breaking them down into milestones and you're getting all excited about it, but you don't take the final step to say, what is the time commitment for that? And then realistically, how am I fitting that into my life? 

[00:07:04] Well, then you're going to be setting yourself up for failure. So back to that initial goal we were just talking about. Let's just talk about that. Running a marathon, well, that takes time. The training takes time. 

[00:07:19] And the training that you would start out today, maybe 30 minutes a day, five days a week, is going to look very different as you get closer to that marathon date when you need to start going on, yes, three and a half, maybe even four hour runs as part of your training. Well, you have to integrate that into the reality of your life to say, is this something I have time for? Or am willing to prioritize in my calendar in order to make this goal happen? Because if you don't integrate those together and look at them together, you're going to continue to feel very out of whack and out of sync and trying to get that plan in motion. And this is where I was going to spend the bulk of our time here today. 

[00:08:07] So that's tip number one is making sure you have not bitten off more than you can chew, either by trying to do too much at once or not actually getting it into your weekly plan. Saying here specifically is when I have the time to work on these activities. Now, the second reason that maybe you've fallen off and you're not feeling or acting consistent with your goals is that you may not have broken your goal down into activities that you actually have control over. So what do I mean by that? Now, for any of you out there. 

[00:08:43] I know a lot of you listening. You run your own business, whether it's through a network marketing company or a business you've built or a hobby on the side, whatever it may look like, a lot of people go and set goals as it relates to business around sales and revenue, right? Or maybe earning a trip or something like that. So you map out this huge goal and say, okay, I want to hit X amount of dollars by the end of the year. I'm going to break that down to generating a certain amount per month. 

[00:09:10] And then you leave your goal right there. Well, guess what? You hoping to earn a certain amount of income per month is not an activity you actually have control over, is it? We don't have control over someone purchasing your product. So we have to make sure that we translate our goal all the way down to activities that we do have control over that we believe will lead to the outcome of our goal, right? 

[00:09:39] So maybe you've set a sales goal for yourself, a revenue goal for yourself and here we are the third week of the year and you're looking at your bank account or you're looking at your sales tracker and you're saying, I'm off track and so you just want to throw your hands up. We're not going to do that. What we're going to do instead is say, well, what are the things that are in my control that I believe will help me hit my goal? And then back to tip number one, making sure that we're actually putting that time on our calendar to do those activities. It breaks my heart when I see people completely step away from a goal that they have simply because they haven't figured out how to translate that into the things that are in their control and they continue to set goals and only look at information that they actually have no control over. 

[00:10:29] And so this is why a lot of people just give up on a goal as well. Now, the third thing that we really, really need to lean into if we find we're not being consistent with a goal, is to have an honest gut check and ask yourself, is this your goal or is it someone else's? Think about that. When I look back at goals that I have set for myself, that I have really struggled to be consistent on and that every time, even when I put it into my weekly plan and I'd see that time ahead of me had grown a lot of the time, it is because it was a goal that I set that I got. Either should it into by somebody else saying, oh, you really should do this, or even if it wasn't a specific person saying I should, I would look around and say, oh well, all those other people are doing that. 

[00:11:24] I guess I should too. And so I set this goal for myself, even though it wasn't something I really wanted to do. And an example in my life, about three years ago, a friend reached out and said, I do enjoy I say the term running very loosely, but it's my version of running. And I used to, way back when, actually run in a lot of fun races. I did some triathlons, I did a marathon years ago. 

[00:11:52] And she said, when was the last time you actually ran in a five K or a ten K? And I said, oh, that was, you know, before Grace was even born. She's like, oh, you should totally register for another ten K to help, like, get back in your training and get some of those distance runs in. And I thought, oh, I did used to love doing those races. So I did that. 

[00:12:10] I went and registered for one. And every morning that I got up to go running, I started hating it. And running is something I actually do enjoy. And I had to finally realize it's because I allowed myself to set a goal that I didn't really feel connected to. And the minute I recognized that and then replaced that with something else, suddenly I found myself enjoying going outside for a run again, but without any reason other than just because I love it and to be healthy. 

[00:12:40] So if you're really struggling to stay consistent with a goal, it's important to make sure that this is a goal that is actually meaningful to you. And the way you can know that is to really dig deep and understand why do you have this goal in the first place. So, quick recap three things that you can really start thinking about if you find that you are, quote, falling off the wagon here as we are into our third ish week of the New Year. First, have you bitten off more than you can chew? Are you trying to change too much at once? 

[00:13:14] Or are you expecting yourself to have more time than what you've planned for to complete it? So either too much of a time commitment or too much change. Secondly, are you zeroing in on the activities that you actually have control over to help you with that goal? And then third, is it really your goal in the first place? If it's not, guess what? 

[00:13:41] You have the right to go ahead and change that. So I would love to hear if you are open to sharing what goal you are most excited about for the New Year. Head on over to Instagram. You can find me at Megan Sumrell. Shoot me a DM, let me know. 

[00:13:57] And if you're struggling to stay consistent, I'd love to hear that too, so that we can dive in together and figure out where there may be a disconnect to get you right back on track. Have a fantastic week. I'll see you again soon. 

[00:14:13] Getting on top of all things time management, organization and productivity doesn't have to stop just because this episode is over. If you want one tap access to all of my training and current top podcasts, go to the App Store or Google Play and download the Pink B app. One word the pink b. It is jampacked with simple yet powerful tips and strategies to get you out of overwhelm and into harmony. And if you have a question you want me to cover on a future episode, go to itunes and ask your question in the Podcast review section. 

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