January is coming to an end, and with the New Year comes a time to reflect on the goals you achieved in the previous twelve months – as well how to overcome failure of not achieving some goals in 2018 – because your failures are just as important for your growth as your successes are.
Failures teach you extremely valuable lessons you need to learn in order to be better able to create the life you want in the future.
But you have to be willing to acknowledge your failures and then analyze them in order to extract new awarenesses and wisdom from them.
Here are five tips to overcome failure and achieve your missed 2018 goals in 2019.
1. Forgive Yourself for Not Achieving Your 2018 Goals
It can be all too easy to become judgmental and get down on yourself for what you failed to achieve.
But beating yourself up over missing your goals isn’t going to change the past, and it isn’t going to help you going forward into the future either.
What it will do is negatively impact your self-esteem, your self-confidence, and your motivation.
So start by letting go of any lingering guilt or frustration with yourself, and then turn your attention to what you can learn from the experience.
Now let’s take a look at the goals you failed to accomplish during the previous year.
What exactly were those goals? And what stopped you from accomplishing them?
The first possibility is those goals were what I refer to as SHOULD goals.
Goals you think you should do, but that you don’t really want to do.
Goals like losing weight, working out more often, running a marathon, spending more time with your parents, and learning a foreign language.
You think you should do them, you think they would be good for you, but deep down you’re really not that committed to them.
These are often the goals that keep appearing year after year on your list of goals and never get accomplished.
You want your goals to be things that you really, really want to accomplish – goals that excite you, goals that you can’t wait to get out of bed to work on.
Goals like de-cluttering your office might be a should goal.
Learning to scuba dive or writing your book, or getting your realtor’s license might be something you really want to do.
Make sure to follow your joy.
Ask yourself what lights YOU up.
2. Be 100% Committed to Your Goals in 2019
Another thing that stops goals from being accomplished is not making a 100%, no matter what commitment to achieving a goal when you set it.
Once you have decided what you really want to accomplish, make a 100% commitment to it.
If you were 100% committed at the beginning of the year, but you lost focus at some point and let it slip away from you, that could be a sign that you need to develop a better planning system that allows you to stay on top of your goals and make consistent progress toward them, no matter what else is happening in your life.
If so, that’s a really valuable lesson to learn. And I encourage you to act on that awareness and implement a daily, weekly, and monthly planning system that will help you stay on track toward your goals.
3. Do Not Underestimate The Time Required
This happens all the time – especially when you’re trying to do something you’ve never done before!
You don’t have a clear idea of everything that’s involved in achieving that goal, and so you grossly underestimate how long it will take.
Or, conversely, you will overestimate the time you have will available each week to work on it. Maybe you thought you’d be able to spend 10 hours a week on it, but the reality of your other family, community and work commitments meant that you were only able to spend two or three hours on it every week.
Obviously, it’s going to take you much more time than you thought!
You either have to adjust the time frame for achieving your goals or throw other resources toward it.
The only resources you ever have are time, money, people, ideas and technology.
If you have less time, you may need to find other partners, employees, contract labor or consultants to assist you.
4. Implement a Better Time Management System
Again, this is a valuable awareness to have, and I encourage you to act on it right away.
Use an online or offline calendar to get really clear on how much time you have available. And look for opportunities to free up more of your time by cutting out activities that aren’t really helping you accomplish your goals.
For example, if you usually spend all afternoon carting your children around to their activities, look for other parents you can share carpool duties with, so you can use that extra freed-up time to work on your goals.
And make sure you have not been majoring in the minors—spending too much time focusing on lower level priorities that don’t have much impact on your results.
For me that was spending too much time on low-level emails that I needed to delegate to my staff.
Also look for ways to prioritize your time more effectively.
For example, you could hire a Virtual Assistant so you can use that time for more important things in your business or your career.
Or start dictating all your emails using the built-in dictation system in your computer or smartphone.
5. Disappear Fears With Tapping
You can also use EFT Tapping to eliminate limiting beliefs.
You may also have run up against some fears that stopped you.
Take the time to honestly look at what those fears are, and you can also use tapping to literally disappear those fears as well.
Remember, every failure contains a treasure trove of valuable lessons if you take the time to look for them. @JackCanfield (Click to Tweet!)
So look for the lessons to be learned and implement them in your life as you set your goals for the year ahead — and you’ll make sure that 2019 is a truly phenomenal year for you.
As the beloved originator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul® series, Jack Canfield fostered the emergence of inspirational anthologies as a genre—and watched it grow to a billion dollar market. As the driving force behind the development and delivery of over 100 million books sold through the Chicken Soup for the Soul® franchise, Jack Canfield is uniquely qualified to talk about success. Jack is America’s #1 Success Coach and wrote the life-changing book The Success Principles: How to Get From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be and Jack speaks around the world on this subject. Check out his newest book The 30-Day Sobriety Solution: How to Cut Back or Quit Drinking in the Privacy of Your Own Home. Follow Jack at www.jackcanfield.com and sign up for his free resources today!
Image courtesy of Victor Rodriguez.
