Having to Reset Your Goals Doesn’t Mean that You’ve Failed
As January is drawing to a close, how are you doing with your 2015 resolutions?
I’ve been talking a lot about setting goals for the year in the past few weeks and I’ve been trying to give you some tips that will help you be successful. Remember that eating an elephant isn’t impossible if you cut it into bite-sized pieces, and you don’t need to be perfect to be successful either.
Even if you’re doing everything right, there is still a good chance that you will need to reset your goals from time to time.
And that is ok.
In running and in life, the path to success is rarely a straight shot.
As runners, many of us have had to deal with injuries, illnesses, and/or life events that have gotten in our way while we were pursuing a goal. And when something like that happens, there is nothing wrong with starting over.
Reset Your Goals, Don’t Start from Scratch
Goals are a good thing. They give us something to strive for, and that continual striving is what leads to improvement.
I have a goal of running Boston someday. I know that I need to improve my marathon time in order to qualify for the race, and that goal keeps me from being satisfied with my current marathon PR because it’s not good enough to help me reach my goal.
As of yet, I haven’t really tried to qualify for Boston because I’m simply not close enough yet. But suppose I gave it a shot and missed by 8 minutes. I would have missed out on my goal time for that race, and would have had to press the reset button and tried to achieve that goal again.
But I wouldn’t have given up. I would have learned from my experiences, and started over.
Too often people fail to achieve their goal, and give up.
Failing to reach a particular goal doesn’t make you a failure as long as you simply reset your goals and try to achieve them again.
Resolutions are Nothing But Goals
If you have (had?) a New Year’s Resolution/goal that you’ve been struggling with, now is a perfect time to simply start over.
Don’t give up.
Don’t quit.
Instead, reset your goals and keep making progress until you achieve them.
Agreed! I actually juat had to reset some of mine too. I think resetting happens often when we are beginners at something. For ex, I juat started my blog and did not really know how it would fit into my schedule and had loftier goals than what I could actually manage. So I reset them after I learned too 🙂
Good for you! As long as you keep moving forward, even if it’s different path than you had intended, you’re still making progress.
Reset, move forward. That will lead to success!