Soon 2026 will be upon us! It blew my mind how quickly 2025 flew by and for it to now be December 2025 and soon January 2026. New Year’s resolutions are a running joke of people setting goals and giving up two months into the new year. But my goal for you this year is what if we made goals that we can stick to? A lot of times when we make New Year’s resolutions they aren’t realistic for us, or they are too vague. So, how do we set a realistic and clear goal for the new year?
A framework for goal setting that is used in a variety of settings is SMART goals. SMART is an acronym for goal setting to help with setting a realistic and attainable goal. The S in SMART stands for Specific. Specific means goals should be clear and well defined. This part is important because it gives us the framework to know what we are working towards. An example of an unspecific goal would be “I want to make more money this year”. This goal is unspecific because we don’t know how much more money we want to make, so it will be difficult to assess your progress and achievement of the goal. A specific goal would be “I want to make 20K more than I did last year by Dec 2026”. The M in SMART stands for Measurable. This means you want to be able to measure your progress on your goal. The goal of “I want to make 20K more than I did last year by Dec 2026” would still be measurable. This would be measurable because you would be able to track how much money you make until you hit the 20K goal. The A in SMART stands for Achievable. This means the goal should be realistic and attainable. So for our previous goal of wanting to make 20K more in 2026 may not be attainable depending on your career. Maybe you have a job where you would not get a raise where you are making 20K a year but your pay could increase by 2 dollars. So maybe your goal will then be “I want to be promoted to manager this year to get a raise” or “I want to get a 2 dollar raise this year”. The R in SMART stands for relevant. The goal should be relevant to you and align with your broader goals or values. If your goal is you want to be promoted to manager this year, but you would hate to be in management or leadership, then the goal would no longer be relevant to you. If you want a raise but do not want to be in management, then maybe your goal would be “I will do trainings this year to get a 2 dollar raise”. The last part of SMART is T for Time Bound. This means that goals should have a clear deadline. For example, “I will do two training sessions by Dec 2026 to get a 2 dollar raise”. So if your broader goal is to make more money for 2026 than maybe your SMART goal would be “I will do two training sessions to get a 2 dollar raise by Dec 2026”.
What is the point of goal setting? Goal setting helps us feel motivated and gives us clear steps to take to live our life in alignment with our values. If you’re having a hard time identifying goals, something that can be done is identifying your values. When we identify our values it gives us more clarity on what is important in our lives. When we know what is important to us then we know what goals or steps we want to take to live in alignment with those values. There are many ways you can go about identifying your values, you can do it on your own or also in therapy. If you want to do it on your own there are games that identify your values, or you can look up values worksheets online. Identifying your values in therapy can be helpful to process and verbalize those values with someone. For the new year I encourage you to think about your values, and work on setting SMART goals that align with your values. This way you can go into 2026 feeling motivated and clear on your goals!