Good morning lovelies,
How are you all doing?
So we are in February – if you are listening to this when it comes out…And I thought it would be a good time to check in to see how you are all doing with your New Year’s Resolutions – if you made any. And maybe you didn’t call them that. Maybe you just defined it as your goals. Or your intentions.
Either way, it’s about that time of year where most people have done a mini-quit by now – and gone straight back to the same behaviours, habits, strategies, and actions they were doing before.
They have, for the most part, given up on the resolution or they’ve somewhat gone slightly off track from where they thought they would be – in relation to their goal.
So I want you to take a second – and think about you –
Have you already hit some obstacles to your grand plan?
Have you fallen off the bandwagon already?
Have you already thrown out your New Year’s Resolutions?
Or started giving up – albeit quietly, on your big vision or goal for the year?
Or are you flying? With everything going smoothly, your belief still solid, your plan working?
Because you might be the latter. But – if you are the former right now – this episode is going to be perfect for you to listen to today.
And if you are ok right now, but at some point down the line, you find yourself having gone off track – you can always come back to this episode – because it will apply at any time of the year – and with any goal or plan.
Because what this episode is really about is when you make a plan for improvement.
Whether that be your time, your organisation, your habits, you finishing work on time, or your results.
And then a month or so in – you find yourself not working the plan. Dropping those behaviour changes, stopping the attempts, and kind of giving up.
So if this is you – I want to first normalise this. I absolutely don’t want you thinking and feeling like you are the only one who struggles to implement changes, who battles with staying on course, or staying motivated and disciplined to continue. There is no reason to feel shame around it. There is absolutely zero judgement from me. And there should be zero judgement from everybody else too – because it is a human thing. Trying to improve – and failing. It is the process. It’s actually how we learn how to eventually succeed.
So that’s the first thing. Let’s have some self-compassion for our challenges.
Then we want to get curious. We want to get to the root cause of the problem.
The reason why we fell off track. What was working, before it didn’t anymore? What didn’t work from the beginning?
And then we want to redecide if we still want the change we were after – if we still want the goal. And if we need to tweak the strategy, the timeline, the approach, or if we need some deeper support to help us get there.
Instead of – what typically happens – is that we just give up altogether, make it mean something about ourselves that we aren’t able to maintain the changes. Make it mean something about who we are, our capabilities, our goals, our self-concept.
So instead of that – we want to be self-compassionate and curious, we want to get to the root of the issue by evaluating, and then we want to tweak and go again.
So let me dive into some of the main reasons why we go off track in the first place. And then I’ll give you the solutions you need to apply in your particular case.
1. So reason number 1 why you might have gone off track…is that you were overambitious with the number of goals or number of improvements you wanted to make all at once. Maybe you underestimated how much effort and focus and discipline and energy and time each of them would take – and so you overcommitted yourself. So you simply can’t fit them all in each day, or week, and you feel overwhelmed when you think about implementing changes and improvements in all of them.
2. Number 2 – is where you didn’t quite foresee an obstacle that has put a spanner in the works – and means you aren’t able to uphold your original intentions with the goal or behaviour changes. For example – maybe you didn’t foresee your kid having troubles at school that would impact on how much time and energy you had to put into this new resolution or goal or strategy.
3. You were too focused on the outcome changing. And as it hadn’t measurably changed in the time you had been working to improve it, you became discouraged by the amount of effort you were putting in with little to no visible progress. So stopping what you were doing didn’t feel like a big deal. It wasn’t working anyway – or so you thought.
4. You decided the short-term pain wasn’t worth the potential of having long-term pleasure. And you haven’t tried to sell yourself that the alternative might be true.
5. You didn’t make the progress doable each day. Even if you had just one core goal – you hadn’t decided upon the bare minimum baseline to commit to and so it became impossible on some days to fit it in.
6. Which leads to your “All or nothing” thinking approach. You missed a day, so you might as well miss the week. Just like the diet mentality of you having one cookie in the morning, and then deciding the whole diet is out the window so you might as well binge eat the rest of the day. You are approaching your business goal or resolutions the same way.
7. You made it too hard for your brain to get on board with. Even if it felt doable, your lack of belief, desire, or motivation to do that thing – make that change or implement that strategy – meant your brain resisted and eventually the resistance won.
8. You let perfectionism creep in – you wanting to do it perfectly was either stopping you from starting or from maintaining the consistency.
9. You didn’t celebrate your wins or progress. You were focused on the gap of how far you still had to go, not the gain. So you never felt rewarded for doing well or for putting the effort in, in the first place.
10. You didn’t set your environment up to support you to change. So all the same cues and triggers were still there for the old behaviours, habits and strategies you wanted to change. And none existed for the new ones.
11. And lastly, you hadn’t changed your existing thinking, your limiting beliefs, your self-concept before you tried to make the changes. The changes you want to make have to be backed up by new thinking, new beliefs, and an uplevelled self-concept if you want them to be long-lasting. Behaviour change starts with you and your identity – every time. And you also can’t solve a problem, with the same thinking that created it.
So these are the top 11 reasons I see behind why business owners will go off track with their goals, or their resolutions. And the impact, of course, is that they either don’t ever get back on track so they don’t hit the goal they wanted, or that it slows them down – because they are effectively taking a lengthy break from the progress they could be making.
So what to do instead…
1 – First want to constrain your focus – to one improvement at a time. One behaviour change. One habit change. One new strategy to focus on. One action to implement. For one goal at a time. I’ve just launched my new program – Time Masters – and in there – my clients focus for one month at a time on ONE improvement regarding their time or productivity. And it is astonishing how quickly you are able to make changes and improvements – when you decide to just work on ONE thing at a time. It keeps you out of overwhelm. It keeps things very clear and simple and doable. You can evaluate exactly what is working and what is not. And make changes immediately to solve for the obstacles that come up. And once you have nailed it, you can fold in the second improvement you want to make. Like ingredients to a bread mix. Fold them in one at a time.
2 – The second thing – with that ONE focus. Is to simply be aiming for 1% improvement at a time. Not all or nothing – not perfectionism creeping in where we want to have 100% improvement over night. But 1% improvement at a time. And it doesn’t even have to be 1% daily. It can be 1% improvement over a week. This keeps you looking for the small wins, keeps you motivated to work on it, and keeps you moving in the right direction – rather than feeling disappointed with the rate of progress when you are expecting more, sooner.
3 – The third thing – is to make the strategy, new habit, new behaviour, whatever you are trying to work on easy for your brain to get on board with doing. So if it is a new behaviour you want to start – create a minimum baseline that you absolutely can commit to at the regularity that you want. An example that James Clear gives in his book Atomic Habits – is that if you wanted to start, say, a daily yoga practice, it would be wise to literally start with a commitment to just 2 minutes. Which sounds ridiculous. But it’s small enough that you won’t allow things to get in the way of doing it. You can get your brain on board. And then you start to develop the habit of consistently practising for 2 minutes a day – which creates evidence to support your own beliefs about yourself being able to consistently practice yoga every day. And like I showed above – the identity you hold for yourself will dictate your behaviours. So if you want to become the person who practices yoga daily no matter what, setting the baseline minimum at 2 minutes – helps you create that reality.
4 – Any time you find perfectionism creeping in to either slow you down, or stop you altogether, you need to remind yourself that B minus is good enough. And it’s a darn sight better than it not happening at all.
5 – Take the time to explore what obstacles might get in the way of you working towards this goal or working on the behaviour. Imagine all the things that might come up. And then strategise how to overcome them, before they arrive.
6 – Ensure that you have a way to measure progress and results from the work you are putting in, so you can effectively evaluate and tweak the strategy if it isn’t producing the result you want. But also have patience where the outcome isn’t likely to change for a good while of putting in the effort. For example, expecting your body to look different after 3 weeks at the gym is unrealistic. But it doesn’t mean that your body isn’t getting stronger and fitter. You just can’t see the outcome changing yet. So here – it is really important to learn to see the value in putting in the effort and experiencing the short-term pain – for the long-term pleasure – even if you can’t feel it yet.
7 – That progress you are measuring – make sure you are looking for mini wins within it too – and celebrating it – so you get the short-term gratification available, to keep you motivated and inspired and on track – rather than discouraged.
8 – Ensure your environment is set up to support you, rather than sabotage your efforts. If it is the same environment that you were operating in before, there will be a number of cues that exist that will trigger the same kinds of responses in you – which will make it much harder for you to maintain your improved behaviours and habits. You will have to manage your mind so much more – than if you tweaked the environment to support your new goal/resolution/habit change.
9 – And then lastly, you want to make sure that all of the limiting beliefs, fears, problem thoughts that you had before, that had created the reality you are now trying to change, have been uncovered and dismantled, and changed for beliefs, and thoughts that support your new behaviours, habits, strategy and goal. And this is really where I come in – if you have trouble with creating the new reality you want – and you know it’s because you keep getting in your own way somehow.
So if you want support with this, or any of the above – because all of the solutions, whilst they are simple, they are not necessarily easy to implement without help, simply send me a message on IG – @kirsty knight coaching – with the words TIME MASTERS in it – and I’ll help you and your business get back on track for your goals.
That’s it for this week lovelies.
I’ll see you next time.
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