As 2024 comes to a close, you may be looking forward to a new year with new goals. Many people aim high but struggle to follow through, especially those of us who are neurodivergent. As a result, you may be wondering how to not only set, but also how to actually achieve your goals. I’m going to offer some advice on setting goals and following through with achieving them so 2025 doesn’t become another year of just good intentions.
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Choose Goals That Matter to You
Those of us who are neurodivergent tend to be able to focus and invest ourselves much more effectively when what we’re working on is interesting to us. If you want to achieve your goals, it will be helpful to set goals that really matter to you.
This may seem obvious like an obvious point but you’d be surprised how many of us set goals we don’t actually care much about. How many of us have set a goal to exercise more consistently? A lot of us. How many of us are doing it out of a sense of obligation because we feel we should be exercising more rather than because we genuinely want to? Probably also a lot of us.
Personally, I have never really been successful at sticking to those goals that I don’t actually care about. It may be more helpful to frame these goals in a different way that appeals more to you. For example, instead of setting a goal to simply exercise more, set a goal to take better care of yourself so your mental health and energy levels improve. Exercise certainly can be a part of that, but this also allows you some space to incorporate other activities or changes that may be more enjoyable to you.
By changing the way you frame the goal, you’re giving yourself more options and hopefully making working towards that goal a more interesting and enjoyable experience for you. That, in turn, will make you less likely to give up on it.
Celebrate Progress, Not Just Completion
One other way to help you achieve your goals is to celebrate progress towards your goals rather than just celebrating once you’ve completed it. This is especially helpful since not all goals will have a definitive end point. A good example of this would be our previous example of exercising more or taking better care of yourself. There’s no point at which you can really say “yup, I’ve done it!” the way you would with a goal like paying off credit card debt. Celebrating milestones along the way can help you recognize the progress you’ve made and keep you on the right path.
If your goal is to declutter your apartment, don’t just celebrate once the whole apartment is decluttered. If you’re a perfectionist like many neurodivergent people are, you may never feel like it’s good enough to be considered completely decluttered anyway. Instead allow yourself a celebration for decluttering each room or even one part of a room. Help yourself recognize the time, energy, and effort you’re putting in by acknowledging what you’ve accomplished, even if there’s still more to do.
As an added bonus, this also helps break down your big goals into smaller, more manageable steps which is often helpful for neurodivergent people in combatting feelings of overwhelm.
Set Rewards
Rewards can be a great motivator, especially for those of us with ADHD who live for instant gratification and may find tangible rewards more motivating. Without a tangible reward, achieving a goal can feel anti-climatic. Giving yourself a reward – even a very small one – can help you feel more motivated to keep going so you can reach it.
Going back to our previous point, you can even set small rewards for milestones, not just completing your goal. Instead, you could set up a reward for yourself where if you exercise x many days out of the month, you take yourself out for a nice lunch or buy yourself that new book you’ve been looking at. If money is tight and that doesn’t feel right, it can be something even smaller, like buying yourself Starbucks on Saturday if you achieve your goals for the week. If you don’t want to spend money at all, you could use a different kind of reward like watching a tv show or movie you’ve been meaning to watch.
The nice thing about this is that rewards are easy to customize to your personal needs and preferences.
These are a few tips I have to help you on the road to setting and actually following through on your goals. I hope you’ve found something helpful. Do you have other advice that helps you achieve your goals? Let me know in the comments!
