Four Steps to Achieve Your New Year’s Resolutions
This is the time of year many of us make resolutions with regards to how we wish to improve our lives. As nearly all of us have experienced, those intentions usually come to naught. Studies say less than 10% of new year resolutions are maintained through the end of the year. There are four steps you can follow to help reverse this trend and achieve your resolutions.
1. Start at the end. Create a vision for the future; how would you complete the sentence “it will have been a successful year if, by the end of it, I have …”? That vision of a successful future serves as a guiding light, a north star, throughout the year to help you stay on track. While the vision should be a stretch goal that challenges you, it should be realistic. It should also be focused, specific, and measurable; “I will be happier,” while nice, is too vague to be useful and “I will lose weight, get a new job, move, get married, be a better friend, take on a new hobby, and win the lottery” is a lot to try to take on simultaneously.
2. Work backward. Since that vision is for a year from now, we need to break it down into its component pieces and work backward in time to better understand what we need to do differently tomorrow to set ourselves on the right path. Answer the question “assuming I have achieved that vision, what would have to be true”? If, for example, success for you looks like losing ten pounds, what would have to true to achieve that? Perhaps you might have to change your diet or increase your activity level. Keep breaking those change aspects down until you get to something specific that you can actually translate into action. Executing the specific actions which enable that vision is possible, however; e.g., “Only eat red meat only once a week” or “Walk the dog twice a day.”
3. Assess your progress. Because the goal is long-term, you need to determine how you will check in on progress throughout the course of the year. If the goal is to lose ten pounds, weighing yourself will be the final test of success. Measuring the end outcome, however, has two issues. First, it is out there in time. Weight doesn’t come off quickly. It is easy to get depressed and give up if it feels like progress is too slow. Secondly, it isn’t connected with the actions you are taking; there needs to be a link between the actions and the outcomes. In the weight loss example, we hypothesized that if we walked the dog twice a day rather than just once and cut back on red meat we would achieve our goal, measure those actions. If we successfully execute those actions for a month or two and see no change in our weight, assess why not. Perhaps we need to adjust these actions or even take new actions entirely. The key is to learn. Are our actions leading toward the intended result? Why or why not?
4. Remember that you are human. Even with a great system for translating your vision into action, change is hard. We humans don’t tend to like to change. Keep that in mind as you work to maintain your resolutions throughout the year. Enroll others to support your goals, find someone to walk the dogs with you, for example. Pay attention to ways in which you might be sabotaging yourself, maybe you are using the extra walk as justification for eating an energy bar. Recognize that you are going to have set backs and learn from them rather than letting them derail you. Don’t expect miracles overnight but stay at it.
These same four steps apply in the professional setting, at the organizational level. As a business leader, you have “resolutions” for how you wish to improve your business over the next year. Follow the same process by replacing “lose weight” with “increase profitability”, for example. Which of these four principles can most help you succeed in 2018? We wish you much success in the New Year, personally, professionally, and everything in between! If you are interested in learning more, please reach out to us at contactus@geigsen.com.