What will success look like?

Make sure you'll know if you've achieved your goals

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning,
This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
tip is to make sure you know exactly what success
will look like. How will you know exactly if you

(00:24):
have achieved your goal? By being specific about knowing when
you have one, as it were, you will be able
to take the actions that will help you get there. So,
this is a time of year when a lot of
people are working toward goals or New Year's resolutions. For instance,
you may have decided to declutter your house, or revamp

(00:46):
your wardrobe, or repair a broken relationship with your brother.
You may have other goals related to work or health,
or relationships, hobbies or something else. I love goals, But
one of the reasons people have trouble with resolutions is
that it is often hard to know if you have succeeded.
What exactly is a decluttered home? How will you know

(01:10):
if your home is officially decluttered. How will you know
if you have gotten in shape or are in a
better place with a relationship? What exactly will success look like? Now,
for some things there is a lot of natural ambiguity,
but even so, it might help to visualize what success means,

(01:31):
and set some sort of metric that you will be
able to work toward achieving. You want to know when
you have crossed the fetish line. Sometimes people like to
motivate themselves with visions of a changed life. A decluttered
home means you have calm mornings when you know where
your keys are on days you work from home, you

(01:53):
don't have to blur your background to hide the mess.
Those can definitely be motivating goals, but even within that,
I would suggest making a more concrete list of steps
you can take that will then allow you to declare
victory when you have done them. For instance, maybe you
make a list of thirty spots in your house that

(02:15):
you would like to see addressed. These could be quite granular.
Each closet is a different item on the list, each bathroom,
each shelf or drawer, even in a particularly cluttered area.
When you have addressed each of these in turn and
remove things that are unnecessary and have put back things
where they belong, then you can declare victory your house

(02:39):
is decluttered. As for getting in shape, another popular resolution,
maybe this means going to the gym three times per
week when you are home and you aren't sick, or
maybe this is a specific goal like being able to
run a five k or lift a certain amount of weight.
All of these can work. If you make it to

(03:00):
the gym on average three times a week during the
forty five weeks of the year you are around, then
you know that you have succeeded. If you run that
five k without stopping, you have won at your goal.
You know what success looks like, and you can work
toward that now. Some goals, like repairing a relationship are

(03:24):
clearly a little less obvious. What does success mean when
it comes to feeling closer to friends or family members?
But I believe that if you put some thought into it,
you could still brainstorm some potential metrics. Maybe you decide
to reach out in low key ways at least six
times over the next two months. If you start getting

(03:47):
civil or even friendly responses, you have succeeded. Or maybe
success is getting together once, even if it's a bit
of a frosty get together. Hey, it's a start. Having
a vision of what you are working toward lets you
know what actions you need to take. A resolution stops

(04:09):
being some vague and unlikely thing and starts being a
bit more like something you can put on a to
do list and do that concrete sense of what the
finish line looks like just may be the thing that
gets you going. In the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks

(04:30):
for listening, and here's to making the most of our time.
Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas,
or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at Laura
vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia.

(05:00):
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