Your Greatest Year: Day 3

Every year, millions of people set New Year’s goals and resolutions. But just a month or two later, most of them get dropped. Your Greatest Year is a multi-part series aimed at helping you make your New Year a smashing success. 🎉

Anchor your goals to strong beliefs

New year’s goals—or any goals for that matter—are most effective when they’re anchored to strong beliefs.

When you believe strongly in something, what you’re really doing is sending signals to your brain—signals that say, “this is really important to me” or “accomplishing this goal is a high priority.”

And when you anchor a strong belief to a goal, you reinforce how much it really matters to you, which increases your likelihood of accomplishing it.

Let’s say you’ve got a new year’s goal to lose 25 pounds over the course of the next twelve months…

Here’s an example of how you might anchor your goal of dropping the weight to a strong belief:

🎯 New Year’s Goal: Lose 25 pounds (or more) by this time next year.

⚓️ Anchoring belief: Living a healthy lifestyle allows me to live with vibrancy and perform at my peak on a daily basis.

You can create whichever types of anchoring beliefs you want. The anchoring belief for the aforementioned example could have easily been one of these:

⚓️ “I take action no matter how I feel, because the pain of discipline weighs ounces compared to the pain of regret—which weighs tons.“

⚓️ “Building strong habits allows me to win at work + succeed in life.”

⚓️ “Making healthy choices gives me energy and longevity.”

⚓️ “I am a beacon of health and wellness.”

⚓️ “I’m a force of nature.”

Or any other statement that juices you up…

The only real criteria for an anchoring belief is whether it inspires and motivates you—emotionally and viscerally—to be the type of person who achieves these goals and/or practices certain habits.

Can you see how powerful linking an anchoring belief to a goal can be?

When we have complete clarity about our beliefs, we begin to approach our goals with more intensity, vibrancy, and excitement.

We feel more driven to do what it takes to support our anchoring beliefs.

Thinking about losing 25 pounds this year can be demotivating and overwhelming.

But combining it with an anchoring belief, like, “Eating well and exercising daily helps me get in great shape and allows me to live a long, healthy, fully charged life”—well, that’s exciting.

Bottom line: anchoring beliefs help us maintain the motivation we need to achieve our goals because they help us see how we can live our beliefs.

In fact, some anchoring beliefs are powerful enough to continue using even after you’ve lost the 25 pounds.

For instance, one of my anchoring beliefs about my health and fitness is:

“I am a force of nature.”

That may not be meaningful to you, but it’s meaningful to me. And that’s what you want to go for when you’re creating your own.

Reminding myself that I’m a force of nature motivates me to exercise every day, even when I don’t feel like it.

It motivates me to bring positive energy to every room I walk into.

It motivates me to treat my body like a luxury car—to put only the highest quality fuel in my stomach.

It motivates me to stay aligned with my spiritual side.

And on and on.

But enough about me.

Now it’s your turn…