Research shows that over 60% of us make new years resolutions and only about 8% of people actually achieve them. Depending on what research you’re looking at, these numbers may vary and the discrepancy between those who intend to eat healthier, read more, exercise more, lose weight, spend less etc and those who succeed is still enormously high.
While setting New Years resolutions is an ongoing trend and a cliche at the same time (you can’t really call them goals, they are too vague most of the time), much fewer people look back at the resolutions they’ve set at the beginning of the year that’s ending and even fewer review to see what went well and what went wrong. This is precisely what I want to look at first, before getting on with the other exciting thing which is setting goals for the next year and decade (next week).
How to do a yearly (and a decade) review?
The purpose of this is not only to see what goals (let’s step away from the word resolutions) you’ve achieved and what goals you haven’t achieved, but even more to see what and how you’ve done differently when you achieved your goals vs when you didn’t achieve them.
- Take a piece of paper and write down what you’ve achieved this year / decade.
- Then take another piece of paper and write down what you haven’t achieved this year / decade.
- Now take a third piece of paper and write down what you’ve done differently when you achieved your goals vs when you didn’t achieve your goals. This will enable you to uncover your strategies for success, the strategies you can employ each and every time when you set a goal from now on.
This is the easiest way to do a yearly (decade) review and to also learn from your goals and actions (and inactions) from the year that’s ending. If you’ve been keeping a journal / working with a planner like the Make It Happen tool for instance, than you should find it easy to go back and finding your old goals and your progress. And, even better, we could do this together.
