If you fail to plan, you plan to fail
One word, people – praise.
Keep yourself happy!
If you’re beating yourself up because you didn’t save as much as you expected, perhaps you’ve either given yourself a challenge that’s unreasonable for your circumstances or you haven’t planned it out enough. The old saying is totally legit for integrity – if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
The majority of budgets, diets, New Years Resolutions, whatever plan or goal people set for themselves don’t work because we only set ourselves one big goal, like lose 10kg or save $10,000. Whatever it is, having one big lump goal is too daunting, almost unreachable. Let’s use learning a language as an example; there are steps we have to take like learning the new symbols, grammar, sentence structure etc before we can say we know a new language.
Here are a couple of tips for you.
1. Have a goals bible. Write everything down and record all your joys and pitfalls. Having a physical copy of everything we want to achieve makes them psychologically more ‘real’ for us, like we are making ourselves accountable for what we want and how we get there.
2. Use whatever tools you have available. Financial goals should use a budget, weight goals, use meal plans, exercise buddies, blogs, forums, friends etc. Again, these work to keep us accountable and integral. They work to guide us and keep us on track!
3. Understand and appreciate that bad days happen and plan for them. Everyone will go through moments of un-inspiration, and the key to making sure you get yourself back on track is to remind yourself why you are on this journey in the first place, which is where our bible comes into play. Go through and read your first entries, have a look at how far you have actually come. Have a look at how much you have saved, or lost, and use that as inspiration.
At the end of the day, keep yourself happy and remind yourself why you are there. I like to give myself little quotes, like no pain no gain; if you fail to plan, you plan to fail etc. Find your own that resonate with you and find your own ways to keep inspired!
If we can find positives in the journey, it will become habitual and these are the keys to sustainability of goals.