As the end of the year grows closer, you might be feeling the pressure because you haven’t yet got done what you hoped to get done in 2025. Here’s a tip that might help.
I do a lot of goal setting with my clients and my home educated daughter. My style of goal-setting is very gentle and based around the persons strengths, commitments and personality. I also only encourage people to set goals that are realistic and achievable. And if the client is off track the next time we meet, there’s no shame, judgment or pressure, we just adjust the plan and carry on.
After all, life gets in the way sometimes.
That might sound very sensible, but often our experience of motivating ourselves is based on pressure and even shame. If we don’t achieve an impressive goal we’re weak and lazy. If we don’t get all our tasks done as planned in the week, we’re slackers and failures.
It’s no wonder we often don’t bother planning the important things in our lives much at all. Setting a goal and then beat ourselves up as we inevitably let ourselves down isn’t much fun.
Where does this come from? My guess is we learnt it as children – my daughter definitely said she learnt it from school, which is why I took the pressure off her totally when she left. But we don’t have to keep it up as adults. There are other ways of motivating ourselves.
So if you feel yourself using shame and disappointment to motivate yourself to get stuff done before the end of 2025, maybe take a pause and think if you can be kinder to yourself this year?
If you’d like my help to set your own goals in a gentle, no pressure way, please do get in touch.