19 Questions to ask yourself before making your 2016 goals

A New Year can be a wonderful motivator for making changes, plans and resolutions. It’s a new chapter and a fresh start; a clean slate. You feel excited about the prospects of succeeding this time. This time you will succeed, this time you won’t fail. This year, you are ready.

The thing about resolutions is that while they give you something to work towards, they also offer a quite fixed measure of success, and consequently a fixed idea of failure. If I fail at my resolutions, I fail, and so I am a failure. Moreover, the unfortunate risk of this is that you write off your resolutions and the year ahead along with them.

If this is a sequence of event that sounds familiar, then like me, the concept of resolutions may not be working for you. I for one do not believe that unmet resolutions equate to failure.

What has worked for me, is to ask myself a set of questions that allow me reflect on the previous year, connect with who I am, what my needs are, and what’s important to me. Using these answers, I have more awareness of what I want to achieve, and am able to design my goals accordingly and authentically.

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1. What moments from 2015 do I want more of in the New Year?

2. The greatest lessons I have learned from the last year are _______

3. What will you do differently this year?

4. What do you need to let go of?

5. What do I want to stop doing?

6. What do I want to do instead?

7. If it were not for ________ I would be ______________

8. If money were no object, how would I spend my time?

9. What is happening in my life right now that I find exhausting?

10. When do I feel the most energised?

11. I know that I am being true to myself when_______

12. Who am I when nobody is watching or judging?

13. Who am I when I am not judging myself?

14. My special gift in this world is ________________

15. The ways in which I want to express my gifts and strengths this year are_____

16. My intention for 2016 is ­­­­__________

17. I want 2016 to move in a direction of (e.g. growth, happiness, calm)

18. I will know I will have fulfilled my purpose in 2016 when _______

19. One word that represents how I want to feel, be and do in this year is (e.g. In 2015 my word was surrender. This year it is brave.)

Wishing you an amazing New Year!