If there’s one thing you probably wish you had more of, it’s probably time. Time is our greatest resource, and once it’s spent it can never been earned back. Time is also the great equalizer. We all have the same 24 hours in a day.

Whenever I’m first meeting a prospective client who is interested in coaching, we meet over Zoom for a 30-minute Free Discovery Call to talk about their challenges and interest in coaching and set coaching goals together. Undoubtedly, a common theme with these individuals when I meet them is that they feel overwhelmed and stressed with the demands of their life, and often find it difficult to make the time for family and their personal goals.

In addition to having a demanding life, another thing my clients struggle with is saying “no” to commitments and requests made by others.

If you’re like me, you’re working hard to reach your goals, but sometimes things don’t go according to your vision or plan. Mistakes, missteps, and failures are inevitable, and so your mindset around failure is crucial. In her best-selling book, Mindset: The new psychology of success, Dr. Carol Dweck describes how we can learn to fulfill our potential by adjusting our mindset.

According to Dweck, “when you enter a mindset, you enter a new world.” Mindsets are “powerful beliefs” that help shape your understanding of self and how you think you can or cannot succeed in the world.

Staying on track and remaining committed to ambitious goals and new habits is undoubtedly challenging. Competing priorities come up, people can pull you in a variety of directions, and days get busy.

One of the best ways to help you stay on track and stick to your goals is form an accountability partner. Research has shown that when people want to create positive new habits that are challenging to form, their chances of success are 500% higher if they have an accountability partner rather than doing it alone. That is a five fold higher likelihood of success!

According to Gretchen Rubin, author of the book Better than before: What I learned about making and breaking habits - to sleep more, quit sugar, procrastinate less, and generally build a happier life, “if we believe someone is watching, we behave differently.”

For some time I have been studying how to improve my mindset and reach goals and have been helping clients do the same. Last year I participated in a training on how to develop a stronger mindset and one of the daily habits the trainers recommended was taking the time to visualize an ideal future and a scene of you reaching your goals. I thought I would give it a try and became incorporating visualization into my daily mindset journaling practice. I also created a vision board to capture my 5-year goals in picture form.

While I noticed a big return on other daily mindset techniques I practiced, I realized I wasn’t particularly getting much from visualizing my ideal future. And now I know why.

New York University researcher and author of the book Rethinking positive thinking: Inside the new science of motivation, Gabriele Oettingen found in her research that positively fantasizing about an ideal outcome actually doesn’t help you reach your goals, despite how nice it may feel.

My 4-year-old daughter and I have been enjoying a nature show on Netflix named Night on Earth where it shows incredible footage of wildlife at night in their natural habitats. Last night we watched the episode titled “Sleepless Cities,” which showcased wildlife who have adapted to living in urban environments as their habitats have evolved to include humans living amongst them. I found it fascinating to learn how the animals have made incredible adaptations to urban living and it illustrated the power of one’s environment and how one’s surroundings shape how you live.

The power of one’s surroundings is not just true for animals. Human beings are dramatically affected by their environments as well. That is because one’s environment is often the nature trigger for cueing automatic habits in ourselves, whether they are positive habits or negative habits. For instance, seeing a bowl of candy on the kitchen counter at home or at the office is a trigger to eat the candy, whether you’ve been craving sugar or not. The cue in your environment is there to trigger the automatic behavior of reaching for the candy jar and receiving the reward of a sweet taste in your mouth.

Therefore, it’s important to take the time to reflect on your surroundings and professional and personal environment to ensure that it is maximizing the cues for positive habits in your life and minimizing the cues for negative habits in your life. I will now provide 5 easy tips to help you craft your environment in a way that it helps you reach your goals.

As we begin the year 2021 and you set your path to reach the goals you set for this year, I invite you to think about the kind of person you want to be as a result of pursuing these goals.

In 2019 and 2020 I had a goal to lose 40 pounds and get my health back on track. The strategies to reach these goals were what you might expect. Eat healthy and exercise, manage my stress, get enough sleep, drink plenty of water, etc. But as I began to take steps to improve my health my desire to become a healthy person strengthened immensely. My health began to be a core value of mine and making healthy decisions strengthened my commitment to be the healthiest person I could be.

As my identity of being a healthy person strengthened, so did my ability to resist tempting sugary foods that didn’t align with my healthy eating plan. As my identity of a healthy person strengthened, so did my ability to stay ridiculously consistent with my workout schedule and as I write this blog I have worked out every day since October 13, 2020. My identity as a healthy person became the core driver to making healthy decisions and creating new healthy habits and breaking unhealthy habits. My actions reflected the person I most wanted to be: healthy.