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Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio.
Good morning.
This is Laura.
Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.
Today's tip is to make sure you know exactly what success will look like.
How will you know exactly if you have achieved your goal?
By being specific, about knowing when you have won, as it were, you will be able to take the actions that will help you get there.
So this is a time of year when a lot of people are working toward goals or New Year's resolutions.
For instance, you may have decided to declutter your house or revamp your wardrobe or repair a broken relationship with your brother.
You may have other goals related to work or health or relationships, hobbies, or something else.
I love goals.
But one of the reasons people have trouble with resolutions is that it is often hard to know if you have succeeded.
What, exactly, is a decluttered home?
How will you know if your home is officially decluttered?
How will you know if you have gotten in shape or are in a better place with a relationship?
What, exactly, will success look like?
Now, for some things, there is a lot of natural ambiguity.
But even so, it might help to visualize what success means and set some sort of metric that you will be able to work toward achieving.
You want to know when you have crossed the finish line.
Sometimes people like to motivate themselves with visions of a changed life.
A decluttered home means you have calm mornings when you know where your keys are.
On days you work from home, you don't have to blur your background to hide the mess.
Those can definitely be motivating goals.
But even within that, I would suggest making a more concrete list of steps you can take that will then allow you to declare victory when you have done them.
For instance, maybe you make a list of 30 spots in your house that you would like to see addressed.
These could be quite granular.
Each closet is a different item on the list.
Each bathroom.
Each shelf or drawer, even, in a particularly cluttered area.
When you have addressed each of these in turn and removed things that are unnecessary and have put back things where they belong, then you can declare victory.
Your house is decluttered.
As for getting in shape, another popular resolution, maybe.
This means going to the gym three times per week, when you are home and you aren't sick.
Or maybe this is a specific goal like being able to run a 5K or lift a certain amount of weight.
All of these can work.
If you make it to the gym on average three times a week during the 45 weeks of the year you are around, then you know that you have succeeded.
If you run that 5K without stopping, you have won at your goal.
You know what success looks like, and you can work toward that.
Now, some goals like repairing a relationship are clearly a little less obvious.
What does success mean when it comes to feeling closer to friends or family members?
But I believe that if you put some thought into it, you could still brainstorm some potential metrics.
Maybe you decide to reach out in low-key ways at least six times over the next two months.
If you start getting civil or even friendly responses, you have succeeded.
Or maybe success is getting together once, even if it's a bit of a frosty get-together.
Hey, it's a start.
Having a vision of what you are working toward lets you know what actions you need to take.
A resolution stops being some vague and unlikely thing and starts being a bit more like something you can put on a to-do list and do.
That concrete sense of what the finish line looks like just may be the thing that gets you going.
In the meantime, this is Laura.
Thanks for listening.
And here's to making the most of our time.
Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast.
If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at LauraVanderkam.com.
Before Breakfast is a production of iHeart Media.
For more podcasts from iHeart Media, please visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hi, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally.
And I'm Hari Kundabolu.
It's a new year, and on the podcast Health Stuff, we're resetting the way we talk about our health.
Which means being honest about what we know, what we don't know, and how messy it can all be.
I like to sleep in late and sleep early.
Is there a chronotype for that, or am I just depressed?
Health Stuff is about learning, laughing, and feeling a little less alone.
Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
A new year doesn't ask us to become someone new.
It invites us back home to ourselves.
I'm Mike Della Rocha, host of Sacred Lessons, a space for men to pause, reflect, and heal.
This year we're talking honestly about mental health relationships and the patterns we're ready to release.
If you're looking for clarity, connection and healthier ways to show up in your life, Sacred Lessons is here for you.
Listen to Sacred Lessons with Mike Delaroche on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is an iHeart Podcast.
Guaranteed human.
