What has happened to those annual resolutions you ask yourself almost as soon as you have set them down. It’s only a matter of weeks before those grand ideas have wafted away not to be seen again for another year.

When you made them they seemed so easy to adhere to. You were going to go to the gym three times a week. That was an easy goal to set. You were going to drink and smoke less, maybe even give up smoking. Seemed reasonable at the time.

Arriving at work on time every day was definitely possible until they started those road works of course and all traffic ground to a halt in the morning. After all that couldn’t be your fault then could it. Phoning your parents once a week was on that list, so was signing up for a new course to help your career along.

By February those New Year’s resolutions had evaporated and you felt guilty that they didn’t at least last until mid-year. It seemed that every year those goals set at the beginning of January have a shorter shelf-life.

What stops you from keeping those promises you make to yourself? What stops you from making those changes that could enrich your life? Why do you hang onto those old habits for dear life, never wanting to let go?

Setting goals and sticking to them is one of the most difficult things to do. Countless self-help books are available in shops and online stores. The proliferation of eBooks on the topic shows that there are many people who want to learn the secret to goal setting.

The biggest secret and one that is seldom discussed is that goals need to be packaged into small achievable steps. It is the idea of one enormous goal that often puts people off and stops them from trying. It’s like planning to climb Mt Everest but you haven’t tried to climb the local hill.

As long as you keep your eye on the goal or your final outcome you will manage to get there by using small steps.

An interesting story was told by a woman entrepreneur who started a very successful weight loss club in competition to the more famous Weight Watchers. She set up her office in the garage of her home. That’s where she tested and assembled her product line of diet foods and supplements and planned her marketing strategy.

Her weight loss club grew into a huge organisation with the additional income of product sales in supermarkets. During an interview for a program on successful women she said that if she had known how big her organisation would become, she wouldn’t have had the courage to start it.

That’s how our goal setting fails us. We set our goals to be so large we fail at them because we lose courage. We need to lose weight? We don’t set a realistic goal, we want to immediately get rid of all the excess weight. The fact that it might have taken ten years to creep up on us is forgotten. We want to get rid of it in a month. When that doesn’t happen we give up.

We want to go back to University to get a degree to help with our career and we give up after a few months. It wasn’t supposed to take that long and be so much work.

Break up your goals into small bite size pieces. Make them smaller and easier to achieve. Being able to easily attain many small successes will more easily encourage you to keep going to reach the bigger goal at the end of the road.

When you were playing basketball as a youngster you would get some balls through the hoop and many would miss. But you always knew it was a numbers game. What you spent hours doing, was to make the numbers game skewed in your favour. The more you practiced the more you got in.

The same applies to scientific breakthroughs, to political achievements, to financial success or to sporting championship wins. The more you try the more chances you have of succeeding.

This principle applies to everything we do. A new young rugby player in South Africa has just been breaking the records in scoring points. He puts his success down to the fact that he practices his kicking three hundred times a week.

The same applies to David Beckham who spends more time than many other professional footballers practicing his famous free kicks. The training regime that Michael Phelps attacks every day is enormous. That’s what made him the most successful athlete at an Olympics in 2008.

It took Anita Roddick many many interviews with different bank managers and funding organisations before she was successful in getting her first loan for her first Body Shop outlet in Brighton. J Paul Getty, one of the more successful oil men around, spent much time and money prospecting for oil in Saudi Arabia and eventually found it where nobody thought there was any.

The Wright brothers flew their first flight in December 1903 and were accredited with being the first to fly an aircraft with controls that made fixed wing flights possible. They maintained businesses in other fields while working on their flying machines part time. It took years for them to succeed. But with all numbers games, eventually they got there.

You might think that these were all exceptional people and that their successes have nothing to do with you. There is one thing that you could end up having in common and that is going with the numbers game.

What have you tried in the past that you gave up on before achieving your goal? What sporting effort, career goal, business vision did you give up after some tries? Could you have gotten there if you had carried on trying?

What distinguishes you from these highly successful people is not so much raw talent but the ability and wish to continue playing the numbers game. Carry on trying even though you are not successful initially.

The Wright brothers crashed many of their flying machines. They were laughed at and ridiculed by many people. It was common knowledge in those days that flying was an impossible task for mankind to achieve. In fact some church minister even thundered against it saying it was against the teachings of the bible.

Michael Phelps swam for the US team during the 2000 Sydney Summer Olympics and came 5th in the 200m butterfly event. In the 2004 Olympics he won 6 Golds and 2 Bronzes and topped this achievement in the 2008 Olympics with 8 Golds and 7 World Records. This after only a 5th place the first Olympics he competed in.

In most cases the ones that win are not necessarily more gifted than their competitors. They have just played the numbers games. Practice, try, ask for more help, push more and finally get those numbers to fall in your favour.

Somewhere and at some time in our lives we change from enterprising carefree individuals into overachieving perfectionists. We set ourselves unattainable goals because we need to, have to, want to get the best there possibly is. Pity we don’t know what of the best we want, most of the time.

Then we don’t make it and we give up. Where in the manual of life does it say that everything has to be perfect. We have to be the perfect employee, partner, parent, home maker, team player, friend and the list goes on.

Why can’t we be happy with life. What about just exploring and moving towards a general direction. Give up on perfection and look forward to living. Enjoy what you have rather than be unhappy because it’s not enough.

Try the middle path. Give up on feeling lost and try a little bit of exploring. Explore your life and see what is happening. In fact why not allow it to happen a little and see where it takes you.

But then that little voice pipes up again and says that you can’t just allow life to happen. You have to do. You have to deliver. You need to perform. Who says? Where does this come from. This constant wanting to achieve something.

Is this where our discontentment in life comes from? We know, somehow, that we have to achieve. We just don’t know what. And yet there is nobody in our lives, or at least when we reach adulthood, who is telling us what we need to achieve. Except for one voice. And that voice belongs to you.

So why not put that voice to bed for a while. Let it have some rest. You can do without it reminding you constantly that you are failing at something. Because you are not. And you certainly are not failing if you don’t know exactly where you are wanting to go.

Allow yourself to amble along a little. Imagine yourself to be walking in a meadow or along a hill. You sort of know where home is so you don’t need to worry about getting lost. But you are also not sure where you want to go. Everything is beautiful and every corner brings you another lovely vista.

Instead of creating some kind of challenge to walk up to the nearest hill in some record time, why not just walk. Enjoy the feel of nature. Listen to the birds and bees and any other noise drifting your way and just amble.

As it takes you along enjoy the vista as it unfolds. Don’t have any expectations, just know it’s going to be lovely. Experience it as it happens. Explore. Allow it to surprise you and do not be disappointed. Nothing in nature can disappoint. All has some beauty.

Why not take your life in the same way. Allow it to surprise you. Explore a little and look forward to what is around the next corner. You are not lost because you know where home is. You are exploring the way rather than following a strict plan. At the least it will provide less disappointment and more likely you will have a lot more fun and unexpected pleasures.