Use Identity To Achieve Your New Year Blogging Goals

Good intentions aren’t enough to achieve your new year blogging goals. If they were, more bloggers, writers, and people would make good on their intentions. Instead, only about eight percent of those who set goals in December achieve them. The reason for this is simple: On January 1, they possessed the same identity they had on December 31.

You can’t set new blogging goals—or any type of goals—and expect to achieve them if you don’t change your identity. After all, you must be the type of person who can achieve those goals.

So, before you set blogging goals, decide who you want to be in the new year. Then, choose goals that correspond with that identity.

Or reverse the process if that seems more straightforward. Set goals, and then decide what type of person can achieve them. With that clarity, choose to adopt that identity for yourself.

The Key to Goal Achievement

Beyond choosing meaningful goals, identity is the key to goal achievement. For example, consider someone who has the goal of quitting smoking in the new year. If that person continues to see himself as a smoker, he will find it hard to quit and likely continue smoking.

However, suppose that same person decides to be a nonsmoker—and adopts that identity. In that case, he won’t smoke even if he gets the urge to pick up a cigarette. After all, a nonsmoker doesn’t smoke.

When your identity aligns with your goals, you’ll find it easy to achieve them. You become a person who naturally acts in a way that leads to your desired results.

You Decide Who to Be

Some people find the identity piece challenging because they haven’t been taught to choose an identity. But you can choose who to be…any time you like.

For example, my stepson changed his identity when we moved from Georgia to Illinois in the middle of his high school years. We thought he’d be upset, but instead, he was happy.

He said, “In a new school, I can reinvent myself. No one knows who I was before. So I can choose to be someone new.”

I wanted to be someone who wakes up when the alarm rings in the morning. My goal was to get out of bed and spend an hour on a morning routine. Since adopting that identity, I’ve always woken up when the alarm goes off, and I also have a morning routine.

If your goal for the new year is to write and publish a blog post twice weekly, who do you need to be to achieve that goal? Maybe you need to be committed, consistent, focused, or productive. Possibly, all you need to be is a blogger; that identity alone may help you achieve your goal.

So, choose who you want to be in this year.

Create Your New Year

You might find creating a vision of your new identity challenging for a different reason. You only can see the future through your current identity.

To broaden your perspective, begin your goal-setting process by developing a vision for the new year. In other words, imagine what you want your life to be like over the next 12 months. Once you can “see” your year, you can more easily determine who you need to be to create that year.

This is a “begin with the end in mind” process. First, write a new year vision in the past tense, like composing a letter to someone on December 31. Then, imagine every aspect of your life as you would like it to be 12 months from now. Include details about your blogging life, such as how consistently you publish posts, how many visitors you attract, the time visitors spend reading your posts, and the blog-to-book deal you are offered by a publisher when a few of your posts go viral.

Choose Your New Year Blogging Identity First

With that vision in mind, determine who you need to be to experience the blogging and writing year you envisioned. What type of person would have lived that life and accomplished those goals? What are their habits? What is their mindset?

That’s who you need to be to achieve your goals. So, describe that person. For instance, would you be tenacious, courageous, or organized? Might you be a writer, blogger, author, self-publisher, or blogpreneur?

Start with Your Blogging Goal in Mind

However, you can also start this process by setting goals. That’s how most people approach their new year planning. They simply make a list of goals and assume they will figure out how to achieve them. They might even plan the steps to goal achievement, but none of this ensures success.

Instead, with your vision in mind, ask yourself what goals you’d have achieved during the year you described. list of them. for example, maybe you wrote and published 104 blog posts, you completed a blogged book, and you landed five guest-blogging gigs. Then—and this is where the process differs—ask yourself who you have to be to achieve them.

Choose that identity. Become that person. Show up in that manner. And watch how you almost magically take actions that lead to achieving those bogging goals.

Two Options, Same Result

To reiterate, you have two options for approaching this identity-based new year goal-setting exercise. Each has four steps.

Option 1:

1. Create a blogging/writing vision for the New Year.
2. Choose an identity that helps you create your desired blogging/writing year.
3. Set goals that align with your identity and help you create your desired blogging/writing year.
4. Take actions that align with your identity and blogging/writing goals.

Option 2:

1. Create a blogging/writing vision for the new year.
2. Set goals that align with your identity and help you create your desired blogging/writing year.
3. Choose an identity that helps you create your desired year and achieve your blogging/writing goals.
4. Take actions that align with your identity and blogging/writing goals.

Notice that the only difference between the two options is whether you first set goals or choose an identity. But either option will do the trick.

Try this new year blogging and writing goal-setting process. Come back and comment; I’d love to hear about your results.

Who do you choose to be in the new year so you achieve your blogging and writing goals? Tell me below, and, please, share this post with fellow bloggers.

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Photo courtesy of NejroN.