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 one, 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 fetish 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 thirty 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 remove 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 five k 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 forty five weeks of the year you are around, then
you know that you have succeeded. If you run that five k 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 Laura
vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.