92% of people struggle to hit their goals - why is that?

Think back to Christmas. You may have overindulged on one too many mince pies or glasses of champagne (in my case - bottles) and when the New Year came you made a resolution to stick by. Are you still keeping to your New Year’s resolution? Maybe you are, if so fantastic but for most of us probably not. I came across a statistic that really took me by surprise, the majority of us would have given up on our New Year's goals months ago. According to research by the University of Scranton, 92% of goals that are set during the New Year are never actually achieved. (Inc. Magazine, 2016)

Then this got me thinking about how and why people are setting goals and never meeting them. First I thought about how setting New Year’s Resolutions is just a thing that people talk about. You make a general statement about something you wish would happen with no real plan behind it, we’ve all been there. But this led me to realise that from working with thousands of clients over the years people often forget to do a couple of crucial things when setting goals and achieving them and that this stat of 8% of people reaching their New Year’s goals can’t be that much higher all year round.

Now that the UK is starting to come out of the other side of this pandemic I’m sure many people will have goals that they want to hit in all areas of their life to be able to get back to some sort of normality. For this blog I will cover some of the things that I use in my own life and that I teach many of my clients to get them to achieve all of their goals.

One of the main reasons I see people not smashing their goals is because they set goals that are too general and not specific enough. It goes back to the same reason people don’t achieve their New Year’s resolutions; they throw out a general statement that is near impossible to reach as they don’t know what they are really aiming for. Research has found that when people followed two principles of setting specific and challenging goals it led to higher performance 90% of the time (Locke, Latham, 1981). This goes to show that the more specific and challenging your goals are, the more likely you are to meet them.

For example, a goal that is not specific enough would sound like, "by the end of the year I want to lose 4 stone". This is way too vague to be achievable. Your goal should look more like this; “During January I will lose half a stone by doing a HIIT workout 3 days a week and a brisk 3 mile walk, 1 day a week. As well as cutting out refined sugars and takeaways during the week”. As you can see the second goal has a clear road to reaching your destination rather than the vagueness of the first goal, resulting in a much higher chance of fulfilling your ambition. A method I use to make your goal more targeted is the SMART method, it’s likely you have heard of it but there is a reason it’s been around for so long because it works. I go into more detail about the SMART methodology and ways to apply it to your life in my new book ‘SMASH IT! The Art of Getting What YOU Want’.

You may be a person that is sat there saying “I’ve used SMART objectives loads of times and I still haven’t quite reached my goals”. If this is you, then you may be missing your ‘WHY’. By this, I mean why is it that you’re trying to reach your goal? This is something a lot of people don’t think about, they know what it is they want to achieve but don’t know why they want to achieve it, and this is the real question you should be asking yourself. On the days when you really don’t feel like working toward your goals if your ‘why’ is strong enough you will keep going. Looking back to a time I or any of my clients have reached their goals big or small it was the presence of the ‘why’ that got us there.

For more information on setting and achieving your goals and finding your why, you can pre-order my new book, SMASH IT! The Art of Getting What YOU Want on Amazon and online and in-store at Waterstones and WHSmith.