By ARVIN DEMERJIAN
NOR OR, LOS ANGELES.- As we go into 2019, many people will decide to set personal goals for the year, some New Year’s’ Resolutions. What is not often considered when setting these goals is plausibility. Can I actually achieve this? Will I stick to it and keep working towards this goal? Sometimes, we get so excited and set these massive goals for ourselves, but then end up feeling overwhelmed.
So how can we avoid this feeling? When setting goals for yourself, make sure they are attainable. The goal has to be reasonable for your lifestyle. If you are working long hours every day, going to the gym every single day might not be the best way to go about setting a fitness goal. Instead try going to the gym a few times a week, and once you achieve that, increase the number of times you go or set a daily exercise goal for yourself in 2020.
Another thing that people tend to forget when setting their goals is that they aren’t specific enough. During my Master’s coursework, my professor told us that our research question shouldn’t be too broad. If your research questions is too broad, it’s hard to keep focus on the end result, and it becomes unclear where you should even start. When goals are too vague or broad, it can be difficult to get started on them. I know so many people who say their goal is to get fit, year after year, but what exactly does it mean to “get fit”? Are they trying to become bodybuilders? Or do they want to be able to lift a certain weight, or just lose weight?
Once you have your realistic and specific goals, it’s time to make a plan. Get a calendar and set some checkpoints for yourself. Where do you want to be a month from now? Two months from now? Six months from now? These checkpoints can help to keep you on track, and can serve as a reminder of your goals throughout the year. For those who want to “get fit,” what should that look like a month from now? Or if you want to create your own business, what should you have done a month from the start?
My goals for 2018 were to complete my Master’s, get hired as a full-time teacher, and to get more organized through the use of a planner. A month ago, I completed my Master’s research and coursework. A week ago, I got hired as a full-time math teacher at a high school nearby. As for the organization goal, I started off strong, and I kept up with my planner until around November, then I fell behind. I will say that once I started using my planner less, I was much more stressed and was forgetting things left and right. As I go into 2019, I want to be consistent in the gym again (going 4 days a week), use my planner daily, and to create exciting project-based assessments for each unit I teach my students.
I hope you all set at least one goal for yourselves, create a plan, and achieve it. There will never be a right time to do anything, you have to make it the right time.
