3 Ways to Maintain Your New Year Energy All Year Long

When the calendar reaches that final page, people all over the world are prompted to reflect on the previous year. They notice the things that brought joy and the things that brought tears. Then they look forward with anticipation. People gather together to celebrate the passing of the old year and welcome the new with all of its possibilities.

A new year is always full of excitement and the best intentions to set and work towards lofty goals. But we all know how quickly those shiny new goals become a snoozed alarm clock, a forgotten checklist, or an empty whiteboard. So how can you make that new year energy last and carry it throughout the year?  

The internet is chock-full of goal-setting tips and tricks, but keeping that fresh energy going comes down to three key ideas.

1. Revisit Your Goals Frequently

Your goals may be set with the best of intentions, but all too often they get lost and forgotten in the busyness of life. Months later you are reminded of them and they are set aside again with hope for next year. If the process continues, a lack of progress towards goals can lead to burnout and negative feelings. But when you create a plan for reviewing your goals, the likelihood that they will be completed increases significantly. The key? Consistency.

In the context of your organization, goal setting and review can be done during your regularly scheduled one-on-one meetings with team members. This means, ideally, you’re revisiting you and your team members’ goals at least bi-weekly. You can work together to set measurable quarterly and year-long objectives that you continuously tie to the current responsibilities of your day-to-day work. All tasks and projects you prioritize should connect with the goals or objectives of your organization, or move the needle on future job aspirations that you and your team members have.

If you can’t identify the main objective that your daily work ties back to, question if it’s worth prioritizing at all or if you could delegate that task.

Reviewing these goals regularly ensures that everyone understands the steps that need to be completed for the goal to be accomplished. It creates a measurable and specific way to track the growth of your team members over the entire year.

2. Make It a Team Effort

The best goals are shared and inspire others. A study by psychology professor Gail Matthews found that 76% of participants who wrote down their goals and action steps and provided weekly progress to a friend successfully achieved their goals. The number of participants who completed their goals without accountability was significantly lower.

Telling others about your individual goals creates a system of support. When the right people are informed of your goals, you naturally begin to care what they think and you strive to finish what you set out to do.

Not only should you set individual goals, but you should also have goals that create team and organizational alignment. These goals help your team members to understand how their strengths fit into the larger vision of your organization. When the goals of a team or organization are aligned, it is easier to create momentum and enthusiasm for achieving goals. The more people you have aligned toward a goal, the more you can pick up each other’s slack and encourage each other.

Goals are a core feature of the Leadr platform. As you and your team members create goals, they can be shared with others who can then see status updates and action items that you are working on, setting up the perfect environment to make achieving those goals more likely.

3. Prioritize People Development

Goal setting is a personal task that requires you to evaluate your strengths and weaknesses. It is a perfect opportunity to develop the people within your organization, but there are wrong ways to go about it.

Goals are more than just projects with a deadline. Reducing goal-setting to just another task to accomplish removes the power it has to help people grow.

Goals are not one-off conversations. Goals set this way get lost in the day-to-day tasks and you lose the opportunity to help your team achieve something meaningful.

Keeping goal-setting focused on the development of you and your team keeps everyone engaged and focused on the why. Their growth is not lost in mundane tasks or the tyranny of the urgent and you get to celebrate their successes as they occur. 

Getting Started: Putting Your Goals Into Motion

One way to accomplish all three of these efforts without having to micromanage the process is by adopting a platform that keeps your goals front-of-mind for you. Leadr is a people development software that helps you engage and grow your team by collaboratively building meeting agendas that include intentional questions, goal tracking, shared learning assignments that pertain to your team’s goals, and much more all within one platform. 

See how Leadr helped Menlo Church transform their goal setting.

A people development software will help you track progress and realign priorities on a daily basis, boosting productivity and clarity to maintain that new year energy. Request a demo to see how Leadr helps teams like yours achieve their goals every day.