Top Tips for a 'Tip Top' 2022

Have you felt it in the air? 

This commitment and fierce determination for growth and self-promotion heading into 2022? It’s everywhere I look, the focus, the words of encouragement, the pride in self-love… it’s all consuming… and I have to say! I am fully onboard!  

We’ve all been here before, skipping down the New Year’s resolutions rabbit hole starting out, full of optimism and enthusiasm… yet most of us start hungering for February and the permission to return to our old habits and comfort zones – and who can blame us... keeping promises to ourselves is hard, changing habits that are easy into ones that take dedication and hard work.. are, well… hard work! 

I stand here looking at the years gone by, the enthusiastic promises of January’s past  … 100% guilty of it myself!

Not anymore! 

But these resolutions are easy to make and hard to keep for one very simple reason… they’re not realistic, or more detrimentally, they are too vague. 

Cast your mind back, to one of your resolutions? Can you remember one? Hold it in your mind, and come on this journey with me… 

Mine is journaling... I start out fully committed and end up with nothing to write, and soon enough… one day passes, then another then another, all full of blank pages… 

Then I approached it differently. In the same way I approach my other goals and dreams. I turned it into a SMART goal. 

Do you want to see how?

Instead of writing my resolution as ‘ I want to journal more’ the goal is the reason I want to do it, and the resolution is a smart goal to get me there. 

Goal – I want to develop my daily self-reflection practice to better channel and develop my voice and my truth. 

Smart Goal – I will write one line every day, of something that I am grateful for. 

The two goals are as different as chocolate and cheese because our goals need to be smart –SMART is an acronym heavily used in management, which has found its way into our personal lives over the last few years. But what exactly does SMART stand for? 

S – Specific

M – Measurable 

A – Achievable 

R – Relevant

T – Timely 

That’s easy to say – but what does it actually look like? Let’s break down my ‘journaling’ example: ‘I will write one line every day, of something that I am grateful for.’

Specific : making it specific helps us take the right step in the right direction to achieve our larger goals. The instruction is simple and clear – one line, every day, focusing on gratitude.

Measurable : This helps make it easier to hold ourselves to account - one line, every day – pretty easy to measure!

Achievable : I am confident I can find one thing every day to be grateful for every day. It makes it feel almost easy.

Relevant : keeping the task relevant means that it will hold more power in your practice. You are more likely to do it as it is something you are passionate and therefore motivated about. 

Timely : Set yourself a time focused deadline to help you stay on track – ‘every day’ – which means by midnight every day, I must have written that line! 

But our goals don’t just magically become a reality overnight (I know, it’s a real shame), so here are my four top tips on how to set your 2022 up to be the year you want it to be.

Be positive but realistic

A positive mindset brings positive things. Absofreakinlutely, but we also need to look at the obstacles in the way of achieving our goal, so I tend to do a mini risk assessment when I set my SMART goals for the year. Because when has anything ever gone to plan? 

Run with your tribe

We can achieve more, when we do it with other people. It’s called the  Pygmalion effect, but that’s a bigger conversation for another time. We work towards others expectations of us, we allow their high standards and enthusiasm to elevate us, always producing better results. It’s important to run with your tribe, to make sure that you are being influenced and inspired by people who have similar drive, goals, values as you do.  So we can allow ourselves to thrive in environments where everyone lifts each other up and collectively works towards the same goal. Yas queen!

Be kind to yourself

We all have wobbly moment and moments of doubt or fear or life trips us up. This can easily get in the way of your goals, however SMART they may be. I try and remind myself (and friends) that we need to speak to ourselves in the same way we would speak to a friend. No one would tell their friend that they’re a failure because they had a bad day, so why would I say that to myself. 

The longest and closest relationship we’ll ever have is the one with ourselves – let’s do what we can to make it a healthy one. 

Please do me a favour and read that again.

Celebrate each and every win!

Yep – it’s that old chestnut again. Just because it’s a task, we don’t need to make it harder than it already is. Celebrate, have some fun doing it, every win is a step closer to where you want to be. 

So here we are, these are my tips on how I set SMART goals for the year ahead and how I tend to go about achieving them. The path to success is never straight, but that’s what life is all about, right?' 

Happy goal setting everyone!