Last night, JCI London members were treated to a fantastic workshop on Goal Setting from the incomparable Simon Alexander Ong. In this inspiring session, attendees learned all about why our resolutions fail and started to take steps to achieve their goals for the year.

Simon explained that there are four main reasons our resolutions fail. The first is that we often don’t have a compelling enough vision! Often, our resolutions aren’t that exciting: we want to lose weight or stop smoking, but these aren’t fun at all. Think about your final destination: you want to be creating goals that you really want to achieve and are really passionate about. Contrary to popular belief, the Universe will help us: just put your faith in her. From there, you just have to be willing to make the leaps in our life to become the successful confident version of you that you see in the future.

From here, we need to be in the right mindset. Failure is not a bad thing. We need to start perceiving ourselves as apprentices of failure. Every time we make a mistake, we have another understanding of how something shouldn’t be done. This seems like a depressing thought, but think instead that now we are one step closer to reaching that goal! Even if the whole process doesn’t work, we might be able to pull out some part of the process that did work. There is a remarkable amount that failure teaches us and we shouldn’t forget that.

The next thing that makes someone successful is the habits they build up. When we take action, we get results which we learn from in a feedback loop. If we get good results, this carries on and builds up to get even better results. If we get bad results, then the opposite is true. Overall though, success comes from what we do daily; day in, day out. We’re currently living in an instant gratification culture: we want to see the results straight away but this is not how these kind of things work. The power of the compound effect is so real and it takes over two years to see some effect from our habits. We grow by 1% every day: the change is tiny but we are growing. Most importantly, we shouldn’t be comparing ourselves to others. Just the self of yesterday.

Finally, one of the biggest things that is easy to overlook is we need to have some kind of accountability over our goals. We need to have someone who can tell us when we’re not working hard enough towards our goals. We need someone who can kick our butts into high gear and help us work. In a slide that Simon presented from Brigham Young University, the probability of achieving our goals looks a little something like this:

10%- “That’s a good idea!”

25%- “I’ll do it!”

40%- Date specific goals

50%- Set plan developed

60%- Commitment to someone else

95%- Committing to someone else and sharing your progress at regular intervals.

With all of this in mind, hopefully this will help you achieve all of your goals! Please share some of your insights: as always we love to hear them, and hopefully we’ll see you at next month’s session!

 And as always, there's a group photo....SORRY.