Expert Opinion: Set goals to achieve your New Year’s resolution

As we start thinking about what changes we would like to make in our lives and businesses in 2020, Stockport-based accountants and business advisors, Hallidays, share their advice for setting goals and making them stick.

Why set goals?

Top-level athletes, successful people, and high achievers all set goals. Setting goals gives you long-term vision and can help to motivate you by triggering behaviours. It helps you to organise your time and your resources so that you can get the most from your life and enjoy it along the way.

By identifying goals and writing them down you’re already more likely to achieve them and be more successful.

Many people pick their ambitions by looking at everyone else, but if you consciously figure out what you want to achieve, you can move up a level. Switch out of achievement autopilot by setting goals that you’ve actually chosen, not that people have chosen for you.

How to set goals

The first step in setting goals is knowing exactly where you are now. Then, you can set about working out where you want to be in the future and decide how you’re going to get there.

To determine your vision, and what goals need to be set to achieve it, it’s useful to break down the areas of your life into distinct sections, like time spent on ‘family’, ‘fitness’ and ‘working on your business’. Then, estimate the percentage of your waking time that you spend in each area, and write next to that the percentage of time that you wish you spent. If there’s a gap between where you are now, and where you want to be, then you need to do something about it.

At first, instead of focusing on the specific detail of the goal, you should think about how you’ll feel when you achieve it. What we mean by this is don’t just think of goals like “I want my business to turnover £10 million” as that goal isn’t motivating enough. Think about what you want to be doing every day along the way, so that you can enjoy the journey as you build your business to be financially successful. You can still aim for the same destination, but you’re thinking about it in a more structured way.

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