The work of moving forward

For many of us, the start of a new year feels like a clean slate. “This year will be different!” we proclaim with optimism and a strong sense of resolve. But how do we ensure that the dreams we have at the start of the year turn into our new reality?

Take a moment, and picture your life as being on a treadmill. The ground is moving underneath you, and you have no choice but to keep taking each step, otherwise you will fall off. You are taking steps, or running, sometimes almost in a trance-like state.

Your attention is fixed on the screen: on your heart rate, your steps, or the time you have left. The treadmill is going too fast. Or it is going too slow. Perhaps the constant pace is feeling monotonous and exhausting. Consider the idea that you have set the speed of the treadmill, and only you can adjust the variables.

You can slow it down, you can speed it up. You can set the gradient and vary it, or you can make it one continuous uphill slog. In your mind, step aside from the treadmill, and take a long, deep breath. Perhaps it is time to re-evaluate what is important to you at this moment.

I encourage you to pause like this more often this year, to learn to reflect and to pay attention to yourself and to your real wants and needs, to extract the fragments of thought that race through your head, and construct them into fully formed sentences to either be acted on or discarded.

If you’d like to look, feel and achieve differently this year, you’ll need to take some new steps. Using January as a planning month can set you up for a year of fulfilment and progress, as long as you are ready to do some preparatory thinking and decision-making.

A dream is a meaningful and inspiring personal goal with a longed-for, rewarding outcome. You can inject a small dose of reality here in terms of what is achievable, but not so much that it squashes your ambitions.

As a start, identify any one dream or goal that you have. It can be related to any area of your life — your family, work, recreation, spirituality, wellness, growth — you decide. It can be something you’ve always wanted to do, or it can be something that recently occurred to you that you would like to work towards.

Write down or type out your dream in one clear sentence

Why do you want to achieve it? Write these reasons down too. Make sure that some of your reasoning includes how you will feel, not only once you have reached your goal, but also while you are working towards it.

Spend some time on this — the more reasons that you can think of, the stronger your motivation will be. It may help to ask yourself, “What else?” a couple of times after you have written a reason.

Construct a “power sentence” that you can say to yourself for the course of this dream to remind yourself of your motivation and to keep you on track. This is a unique sentence, just for you, so you choose the format and the wording. You have decided what you want to achieve — now decide what you want to keep saying to yourself to help you get there.

Here is an example:

Dream/ Goal: This year, I want to get my financial affairs in order.

Reasons: I want to feel financially stable, more secure in my financial future, be free of unnecessary debt and worry less about my resources. I want to feel more in control and create discipline around my spending and saving habits by having a plan. I want to set a good example for my children. I want to create an infrastructure that I can sustain as I move forward that will give me security and greater opportunity.

Power sentence: I am financially savvy and sound, and I am creating resources and options for my future.

Decide on your plan

What are the concrete steps that you will need to try, each day, to cover the ground to reach your goal? Don’t let your dream stay trapped as a wish – it needs specific actions to be realised.

Dote on the details, because the more time you spend constructing a concrete plan, the more attainable it will be. Remember to be realistic with the steps that you identify. To help formulate your own customised plan, go through each of the questions below and use some of them as a framework to help you decide the best path to follow.

Have your diary or calendar close at hand and schedule the main steps just as you would important appointments. These “meetings” in your calendar with yourself are a commitment — treat them just as you would any other important appointment that you make. Arrive on time and be prepared.

Here are some questions to use as a guide for creating your plan:

• How long do you realistically need to achieve your dream? Set a target date.
• How often do you need to take each of these steps?
• What exactly needs to be done each day or each week?
• What time of day will you take these steps?
• What is the first thing that you need to do today to begin? And the next thing? And the next?
• How will you track each of these steps?
• What are the challenges you may face, and what can you do when you encounter these challenges?
• Do you need to make any changes to your environment to support the steps that you have identified?
• Do you need to enlist the help of others to achieve your dream?
• Are any of your current habits not supportive of your plan, and what can you do to change these?
• What (positive, reinforcing action or gift) can you reward yourself with for every week that you follow your plan? Put your list of rewards in your diary or tracker too.

Revisit the time and target-date question. Now that you have thought a bit more about this, how long do you need to take all the steps necessary to realise your dream? Keep your plan realistic. If you missed a day or week, what will you do to get back on track?

Be open to tweaking and adjusting as you follow your plan. Do not expect linear progress, and allow your feedback loops to make your plan stronger.

You might find yourself reading this quickly and skimming through these questions. You may think that you will come back to do this another time and be content just to have identified the dream for now. By taking the time to construct and personalise your plan, you are more likely to see your goal come to fruition.

The plan is what gets you to the place, even more so if you are the one who came up with it. If it gets handed to you by someone else, you have far less chance of taking ownership of it and therefore achieving it.

Get going with the doing

The power is in having your plan, and then pitching up, relentlessly, to follow it. Adhering to your decision, day after day, even when you don’t really feel like it, is what will move the needle and get you by degrees to your goal. To persevere, you will need to have passion for the plan and for the reasons you want to pursue it.

Review the plan periodically, refining it where necessary so that your action steps keep making sense. If you trust in the process you have created, you will have a better chance of reaching your destination.

To help you with the doing phase, read your plan every week. Keep using your diary and your tracker daily. Adapt your plan where necessary. If you slip up, reassess and renew your commitment. Pick up where you left off or start again. Keep persisting and trust time to take care of your progress.

In our year ahead, there will be mixed experiences: happy and sad; rewarding and difficult; challenging and sobering.

We design our days, and how we choose to navigate them. If your intentions and decisions are sound, then there will be great joy and satisfaction in the doing. Here’s to an intentional 2026 based on planning, progress and, most importantly, pausing to enjoy the results of our efforts. DM