Every year, some people set resolutions and goals that they absolutely want to achieve and maintain in the new year. Perhaps you’re one of them. Perhaps you also know that often the motivation and energy that accumulate at the end of the year quickly dissipate. And so, before January is even over, you might be thinking, “I’d rather give up, and I don’t know how I’ll make it through the year.” What now? If giving up isn’t an option for you, here are 6 things that can help you achieve your goals and strengthen your self-leadership.
1. Take control of your emotions
Often, it’s about habits we want to change in the new year. But if we don’t make progress at the desired pace, it can bring us down. It’s easy to start feeling sorry for ourselves and believe that we can’t do anything anyway, and that everything this year is a waste… Before you know it, a whirlpool of negative emotions takes control. Negative thoughts about ourselves, our abilities, and our life situation overwhelm us and threaten to take over. Now it’s time to hit the brakes. But is it even possible? The answer is yes! You’re not defenseless against your own feelings. Because you can take responsibility for your emotions and decide for yourself how you want to deal with them. By consciously using your willpower to not let yourself be overwhelmed by negative feelings, you can remain calm. Because if we’re honest, as small as our self-pity would have us believe, our possibilities aren’t limited, and there’s always something good to focus on. By counteracting emotionally, you can manage to have positive feelings even in difficult times and focus on the future. This creates an important prerequisite for new motivation: the openness to let it in.
2. Understand what gives you meaning
If you feel lost and have difficulty finding goals for yourself, it may be because the meaning behind them is not (or no longer) clear to you. Therefore, to realign yourself during a motivational low, it can be incredibly effective to introspect and bring to the surface what is really important to you and what values underlie them. What do you believe in, and what is the meaning for you? Once you’ve sharpened your focus on these profound questions, you can realign your compass and become aware of your intrinsic motivation anew. If you find that you’re not pursuing certain things because they’re not in line with your values and sense of purpose, you can discard them.
3. Reflect on and specify your goals
Often, a cause of lack of motivation is that we don’t approach goal-setting correctly. Either we haven’t set any goals at all, or our goals are too vague, and we (more or less consciously) have a sense that it won’t work. An important step to regain motivation is to reflect on your own goals (What do I want to achieve this year? Do I find that meaningful?). So grab a piece of paper and a pen and think about it. You should also eliminate another motivation killer in the next step to give yourself a realistic chance of achieving your goals. Because if you don’t specify your goals, that is, break them down into smaller steps and provide them with a realistic schedule, it will be even harder for you to muster the necessary strength and discipline. If you have a concrete agenda with small steps in mind, it’s much easier to get started. And you’ll see how good it feels to check off completed steps.
4. Find your personal motivation helpers and sources of strength
Meaningful and clearly defined goals are unfortunately still not a guarantee of success. Even if we’ve planned everything and checked for meaningfulness, sometimes we lack the motivation to start or to stick with it. Because it takes energy. So take a look at your personal motivation helpers and sources of strength. What gives you energy? What things act as motivators for you personally? How can you recharge in everyday life? Do you currently have enough energy to continue? If not, it’s better to recharge your batteries and give yourself your own motivational boost. A walk with a view, a conversation with a good friend (who ideally encourages you), a good cup of coffee, a full 8 hours of sleep, an episode of your favorite series… make a list of things that have proven themselves in the past or that you discover as new sources of strength for yourself. This way, you’ll always have several options to try out when you urgently need new motivation. It’s best to consciously incorporate these things into your daily life. That way, you regularly pass by your “gas stations” and stay in the race.
5. Reduce distractions
When motivation is at its lowest, we like to pass the time with all sorts of more or less useful things, and at the end of the day, we’re left with a bad feeling. No question – we can’t constantly focus on our goals and tasks and need to take breaks and time off. But if you repeatedly find yourself being distracted by certain things, wasting valuable time, and then regularly regretting that they keep you from important things, it helps to reduce these distractions. For example, you can set fixed times of the day for these activities (whether it’s social media consumption, Netflix, gripping books…) or, if you find them very harmful, better to do without them altogether. Even if it’s difficult at first, it can be incredibly liberating to temporarily or even completely say goodbye to persistent time thieves, and less really becomes suddenly more.
6. Celebrate your successes
Finally, here’s a particularly nice thing with which you can repeatedly boost your motivation. Celebrate your everyday successes. Enjoy consciously the wonderful feeling that spreads within you when something that has cost you a lot of strength and nerves has been successful or simply completed. Share the joy of mastering challenges with your loved ones and reward yourself for reaching milestones. Keep these successes preferably in a diary, with photos, or in some other way as a reminder. Because looking at what you’ve already achieved can put you in top form again, and being aware of what you’ve already accomplished can give you the decisive push in the right direction in moments of lack of motivation.
Now it’s time to get started! If you’ve taken the first step, you’ve already won a lot. And if you stall again in between, you now have at least 6 ideas to strengthen yourself again with new motivation.
