How to Stay Motivated to Achieve Your Goals

Going into the new year, I’m sure we both have goals that we are trying to stick to. I tend to totally forget about most of my goals once February comes around. It’s normally because I didn’t put full effort into making them happen in the beginning. It is important and very helpful to have an “action plan” behind these goals in order to reach them.

For example, one of mine and many others’ goals this year is to prioritize fitness. An action plan for this would look like making a fitness log or calendar to track the times you exercise, or setting daily/weekly reminders on your phone. If you can make a good habit of doing this and staying on top of achieving your goal, it will get easier to do-hence you not having any burnout early on in the year. To show you an example of what I did for to avoid burnout, here is my fitness calendar for this upcoming month below:

feel free to copy, paste, and print:)

I plan to circle the dates of when I exercised and write down how long I exercised. This will help me see if I am reaching my goal (my goal is to exercise four to five days a week in order to finish my PE hours). Having it right in front of me on my bulletin board each day will remind me to get up and get moving.

There is a quote by Jim Ryun that’s one of my favorites that keeps me going. It says: “Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.” If you can start with an action plan to motivate you and get into good habits that will help you achieve your goal, it will be easier to keep going. Also, at the end of the year, it is super accomplishing to see what goals you have reached and what you have kept up because of your good habits. It will encourage you to continue reaching goals each year because you have seen the results of good habits and action plans. So let's try this together. Maybe an action plan is all we need to reach that one goal that we keep putting off each year.

Happy New Year!

-Lydia