Wow, 2020.
It was quite a year, wasn’t it?
Remember that excited feeling at the start of 2020?
Oh my God. 2020 is going to be the best. It’s a new year. A new decade. Oh my God. Yeah.
In this video, I’m going to be talking about making resolutions in 2021, using all of those lessons we learned from 2020.
Hi, it’s Ivana helping you get fit healthy and strong at any age.
I’m going to share nine tips for making resolutions in 2021, taking into account all the uncertainty that’s still ahead of us.
And the last tip I actually included in my resolutions video last year. And it pretty much gives you everything that you need so that you can meet your goals. No matter what the situation is.
Learn From The Past
My first tip is learn from the past.
Why didn’t you achieve this goal before? Was a goal too big? Was a goal too small so it didn’t inspire you?
Were there other things that got in the way? Obstacles that perhaps you could have predicted? Or you didn’t come up with a plan to overcome the obstacles that you might be facing, even if you’ve tried to achieve your goal before each of those times that you’ve failed at achieving your goal.
You’ve learned a little bit about how to achieve your goal the next time. So you know what works and you know what doesn’t work learn from your past, and you’re more likely to achieve your goal in the future.
Don’t Choose A Goal That’s Out Of Your Control
Maybe let’s not plan to go to concerts yet, unless we know that those are going to be happening. Don’t plan to go into the leaning tower of Pisa, because Italy might not want to see you yet.
Don’t even say you’re going to go to the gym cause they might not be open. So just say that you’re going to exercise three times a week. Maybe it’s a body weight workout. So stick with something simple. That’s within your control. You can exercise without the gym. So now we know let’s be a bit more flexible. Let’s make our goals a bit more flexible and then we’re more likely to achieve them.
Follow A Structured Plan
Now, a lot of times people make a goal like losing weight, but they don’t really put the steps in place in order to achieve it. So you want to break your goals down into a structured plan with smaller steps. So if you want to lose weight, then you might be adjusting your nutrition plan so that you’re having fewer treats during the week, or you’re having no trees during the week and a couple on the weekend, or you may be increasing your protein intake. These are all good strategies for weight loss. By the way, you may be increasing how much water you’re drinking throughout the day. You might be cutting down on sugary drinks.
You need to break it down into a structured plan with a step-by-step process.
Now, for me, when I decided I wanted to do this YouTube channel, I signed up for a course so that someone who is very experienced could show me the way to actually produce the videos, how to tag the videos, how everything goes in place that really made it easier for me because having that structure really keeps me focused on the goal and lets me do it correctly.
The first time I’ve actually created my On Track course in order to help people lose weight, lose body fat, gain muscle. Everything’s that’s related to reaching your goals on the fitness side. And my purpose there is to really simplify it and make it easier for you to follow a structure.
A lot of times people are running around looking for information everywhere and the information doesn’t match up. And then they’re so confused that they just decide to give up. So make sure that you have a structure for achieving your goal.
Find A Strong Reason
Sometimes we have a goal, but we’re not exactly sure why it’s so important to us.
Why do you want to lose weight?
Why do you want a six pack?
You need to think about these things because if you’re going to keep moving forward towards that goal, you need to have a good reason why you’re doing that.
I saw a great example recently of a very strong reason, and it wasn’t a German Christmas ad and you see this elderly gentlemen and every day he’s training with a kettlebell.
So he’s lifting his kettlebell up and then he’s kind of pushing it out. And then he lifts his kettlebell up and pushes it out.
No matter what the weather he’s doing this, and you see, he kind of goes into his room and he’s got a picture of somebody there. Every time he goes to do his kettlebell training, then it comes to Christmas time and you see he’s heading over to see his family. And he gives his granddaughter a Christmas tree topper and she opens it up and he lifts her up and then pushes her out so that she can put the Christmas tree topper up on the tree. It gives me a bit tears off to be honest. It’s obviously very sentimental that you see at the very end. And this is like the jackpot. You see the picture that he’s been looking at.
It’s a picture of his granddaughter has been really motivated by seeing the picture of his granddaughter and what he’s about to do. This is a great example of how you can help yourself achieve your goals. If you find a very strong reason.
Set Your Priorities
what’s most important to you. You may have several things that you want to achieve over the course of the year, and that’s fine, but you want to make sure that you know, which ones are the most important for achieving and which ones can kind of be pushed to the side. If things become a little bit too challenging, sometimes your goals will even run in direct opposition to each other and you can’t do both. It’s good to know where your priorities lie. What’s first what’s second what’s third. And if there’s anything else you’re working on, it’s kind of lowest priority.
So when the pandemic hit, my son was home from school, they shut down his school and I was homeschooling a five-year old. It became a little bit of a struggle to achieve the other goals that I’ve set for the year. I decided that I wanted to learn French.
I realized that I could only do maintenance with the French, given that my circumstances had changed. Although I didn’t want to give up the goal altogether, that’s also an option. If it no longer works for you, I decided that I wasn’t going to do any pushing further ahead with the French studies, I was just going to do the maintenance, continue with the apps that I was using and just keep that maintenance up so that when my time became a little bit more. When my son went back to school, I could push a little bit further in the direction with that particular goal, because that was a low priority goal for me.
I shifted my priorities.
I didn’t feel that pressure for the minor goal that I had set for myself at the beginning of the year.
Do A Weekly And Monthly Check-In
things change. And sometimes they changed dramatically and very quickly, but it’s important to keep checking in on your progress towards your goals on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis. See how things are going.
Maybe the steps that you’re taking are not the right ones and you’re heading in the wrong direction, or maybe you’ve just had a little bit of a blip and then you need to refocus yourself. So those are things you need to be aware of. And if you don’t take the time to look at your goals, then you’re not going to be aware of what’s happening. It’s all about tracking and monitoring your progress. And that’s really important for achieving your goals.
You can also look at what’s holding you back.
Is there anything you can change? Is there any help that you can get to push yourself in the right direction.
Be Accountable To Someone
If you don’t tell anybody your goal, it’s going to be less solidified in your mind. You’re actually less likely to achieve that goal. Make sure that you’ve got somebody, whether it’s a friend or just someone that you’ve met in a group who can be an accountability partner for you, or perhaps an actual coach.
Again, I got to toss in a plug. That is what I do. I’m an online coach.
Someone who can monitor your progress, keep up and then perhaps as you in the right direction, if you’re heading the wrong way, it’s often good to have support. There are always going to be bumps in the road. Sometimes there are going to be quite big ones.
We want to make sure that we’ve got someone there alongside us to help achieve the goals, to make sure that it’s somebody that you trust and somebody who can be positive and supportive as well as perhaps giving you some tough love once in a while.
Don’t Feel Pressure To Be Perfect
Now here’s one that a lot of my clients have struggled with. And I did myself in the past as well.
Don’t feel pressure to be perfect. A lot of us get caught up in that all or nothing phenomenon.
I’m either eating perfectly and exercising every day or I’m lying on the couch and Netflixing with a bag of chips.
So we need to think about those things. It doesn’t have to be that there are a lot of other ways to achieve a weight loss goal, then just going to full extremes or completely giving up.
We need to work somewhere in the middle, actually just being consistent with those good behaviours is much more effective than trying to do something like say completely cut out sugar for a month.
I know people do these challenges all the time and you can learn a lot through that process for sure. However, it’s not really possible and realistic to do that. Long-term try to be a more moderate with your approach. Progress is always better than perfection.
Modify Your Goals As Needed
Now this was my top tip from last year’s resolution video.
And if you follow this tip, you would have been able to achieve your goals in 2020, no matter what happened. And we know what happened.
Modify your goals as needed.
Sometimes a goal doesn’t make sense anymore. It may not be possible for you to do it. Maybe you had a plan to do a full European holiday and like 10 countries and in a month. And it wasn’t possible to achieve that anymore. I suppose we can go back to make sure that the goals are within your control. Uh, but some things we didn’t really even think about before 2020, right?
We didn’t think that those things would be an issue.
Remember that just because you made a goal doesn’t mean that you can’t change it.
You don’t need to stick it out, even when it feels like it doesn’t make sense, or you don’t want that goal anymore, or it’s just not possible for you to achieve it anymore.
There’s no point in beating yourself up over not being able to achieve a goal that doesn’t make sense anymore. This is another reason why I say do a weekly and monthly check-in.
Make sure that those goals are still appropriate for you and that you actually want to keep achieving them. And that it’s actually possible for you to achieve those goals without driving yourself completely nuts.
The Bottom Line
Let’s be flexible going into 2021 because I think it’s best to have an open mind to roll with the punches a little bit and not expect everything to turn out exactly the way we planned that to me is one of the biggest lessons that I learned in 2020. I hope that was helpful for you.
I’d also love to hear what your goals are.
Please leave them in the comments. And I hope you join me for a very successful 2021.
