One simple step to effortlessly set and achieve your goals
New year, new goals, new you! It’s that time of the year when you start fresh, and set goals to achieve your dreams. During the new year, you have the highest energy to set and achieve your goals. But what are goals?
A goal is often defined as a desired outcome that we want to achieve. Some examples of goals include losing weight or achieving the body of your dreams. Or perhaps you have other goals like making x amount of money or achieving a certain target at work.
Some might have a system to achieve these goals like the SMART goals system or not have one altogether!
In this guide, I want to focus less on traditional goal-setting methods that focus on SMART goals, consistency, or habits. Although these are great, they can often feel complicated and hard to practice especially if you struggle with discipline. So in this guide, I wanted to keep goal setting simple and effortless such that it can be achieved in one simple step. In this guide, I introduce the concept of intuitive goal setting.
What is intuitive goal setting?
To me, intuitive goal setting means listening to my intuition, my body, and my needs. Intuitive goal setting is about listening to what your body wants to do and needs to do. Your body holds a lot of wisdom and listening to it can unlock your greatest potential. So at the beginning of this year, I asked myself the magical question, What do I need this year?
I realized that I wanted and needed to focus on myself this year. The past year was quite draining because a lot of my energy was spent outwards whether that was going to work, social events, or other people. This year, I want that energy to go inward. This is what I need. Based on this need, I set my goals accordingly.
1. What do you need this year?
Ask yourself this question now. What do you need this year? How do you want to allocate one of your most important resources – your energy? Intuitive goal setting is also about being wise with your energy. Where does your body want to allocate its energy? Outwards? Inwards? A combination of both?
2. How can you meet this need?
What goals do you need to set to meet this need? I then asked myself, what are some ways in which I can put my energy inwards? To me this meant, investing in myself through my hobbies, spending more alone time, healing, and taking myself on more solo trips and dates!
So intuitively, these became my goals. Do you see how I didn’t come up with these goals out of thin air or because someone else on Instagram was doing them? Rather these goals came straight from within and it’s what I needed. This is important because these are goals that I value and you are much more likely to achieve a goal that you value as opposed to something you don’t. These are known as self-concordant goals.
3. Define a system.
Now that you know intuitively what you need to do, you can get more concrete and put systems into place to achieve these concrete goals. For example, working on my blog is one of my goals. I’ve placed a system for myself to help me stay consistent and achieve my goal.
I focus on small achievable steps like writing one post per week and having an accountability buddy to stay consistent. This also involved reducing or cutting out things and people that distracted me or prevented me from achieving my goals. For example, I decided that I needed to cut down on social time and social hangouts as that depleted my energy and left little time and space for me to express myself through my writing.
For more information on defining systems, habits, and consistency, check out this blog post.
Bonus Tip
Remember that where your focus goes, energy flows. Remember to focus on the areas where you want your energy to flow.
Summary
In summary, intuitive goal setting is about determining what your body needs and where you want to allocate your energy. Once you know what you need, figure out how you can meet those needs and turn them into your goals. Finally, define and set a system in place to meet those needs. To do that, you can use traditional goal-setting systems.