2020, came with many things, the most prominent being the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic that caused total and partial lockdowns in almost all parts of the world. It’s understandable if one might not have been able to reach their goals. It was a long year, filled with many pitfalls, and the restrictions on our movement sometimes might have extended to restrictions on our minds. The past year is gone, but there were a number of things that you probably planned for that year that you weren’t able to achieve. You feel upset, downtrodden and sad that you let yourself down another time, losing hope for the year to come with the assumption that it’s just going to be the same as the previous one.

It’s a new year, and the new year brings new goals, new decisions, and a number of endless possibilities. Forgive yourself for your perceived failure in the past year. You survived 2020, and as long as you have life, you have opportunity. Here are a number of things you can do to deal with the failure of not reaching your goals and re-strategize for the months to come in 2021.

Express gratitude for your survival of the past year: Gratitude is one of the most important things you can do for yourself especially when you’re feeling down. Sometimes life kicks us down and we forget the little things that we should and can be grateful for. An attitude of gratitude inspires in us a feeling of positivity that can be used to motivate us in reaching our goals.

Reflect on your mistakes and the reasons why you struggled/were unable to reach the goals: When we don’t reflect and weigh our mistakes, we are almost always bound to make them again. Realizing where we went wrong helps us avoid making the same mistakes again and allows us to be more conscious of the decisions we take so that we do not repeat mistakes. Similarly, reflecting and recognizing the reasons why we were unable to meet our goals helps us figure out ways in which we can do things differently and work around certain roadblocks in our lives in order to reach our goals. For example, perhaps your goal was to get ahead in your fluency of a language. You might have practiced once or twice a week and read a few materials. However, you realized that was not enough because you do not understand the language to your satisfaction. You might not have dedicated enough time, or done a little more research on what it might have taken to achieve this goal. Reflecting on this and realizing why you might have been so wrong helps a lot in restructuring your approach to achieve that same goal in the next year.

Write down your past goals and remind yourself of why these goals were important to you: Journalling or simply typing up the goals you made in the past year and reminding yourself of why these goals were important to you to achieve sparks the desire and the motivation for you to achieve them in the coming year.

Plan out goals, outlining the steps and things you might need to achieve the goals: If you’re very serious about achieving your goals an outline of what is necessary to be done or a step by step plan with deadlines is necessary as something you can measure your progress against. Taking a deep-dive into what exactly you would need to do to achieve your goals will give you exactly the focus you need to achieve your goals.

Finally, don’t forget to remind yourself that it’s a marathon and not a sprint. You might fall, but you can always pick yourself up. Good things take time and patience. Be kind to yourself. There is almost always a blessing in the form of lessons learnt from every failure.

If you have any other tips on how to re-strategize for 2021, do share!

Happy New Year!