The single girls guide to making goals

Welcome to the first of our 'Single girls guide' series. In this issue, we talk about making goals. It's the start of the new year, and if you're like most people, you have some goals or new year's resolutions for this year. Typical goals including losing weight, exercising more, saving up for a big purchase, e.g. a house, car, etc. But how do you make goals that are achievable? How do you ensure that come the end of 2020, you don't look back at your goals with a sense of disappointment in yourself?

Goals are important; they help you to push yourself and grow. Having goals helps you to maintain focus when life gets busy and tries to distract you from what you're supposed to be doing. Here are 5 tips on making goals for the New year: 1. Be realistic. There is no point in making goals that are simply impossible to achieve, even with the best of intentions. Goals should be realistic, achievable, and relevant. The aim should be to keep improving and becoming a better version of yourself. The disadvantage of making unrealistic goals is that when you don't achieve them, you can beat yourself up and get discouraged, or even give up totally! 2. Write them down. There is something powerful about seeing your goals written down in black and white. The truth is, if you don't write them down, it is highly likely that nothing will come out of them. Writing down your goals helps you to be accountable to yourself, and writing them down somewhere you can see them regularly keeps them at the forefront of your thoughts which means you're more likely to achieve them. 3. Have a timeline and break down your goals. You need to have a realistic time frame of when you want to achieve your goal by. If for example your goal is to save £12,000 by the end of the year, you know that you will have to save £1000 each month to achieve that (if you start in January). However, if you only make £1,000 a month, it means that your time frame is not realistic, unless you have another source of income. Breaking bigger goals into chunks makes the goal more achievable, and means you're not overwhelmed by the size of the task. Like in the example above, saving £12,000 may seem like a lot, but when you think about it in terms of £1,000 monthly savings, it doesn't seem too bad. Another good thing about having bite-size chunks of your goal is that you can give yourself a pat on the back once in a while and it gives you motivation to keep going. 4. Tell someone. Whilst I'm not advocating you go about telling everyone about your goals, it is important to speak them out loud and perhaps tell one or two people that are important to you. Telling someone allows for accountability not just to that person but also to yourself, as there is power in voicing your intentions. 5. Review them and take stock. There is nothing wrong in reviewing your goals throughout the year. We all know life happens, and you may decide that some goals need tweaking, or are no longer possible in the time frame given. A lot of people make the mistake of writing down goals and not looking at them again till the end of the year, or the beginning of the following year. It is important that you review your goals periodically to see if you're on track, and adjust them if necessary.

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