A few weeks ago I wrote about the importance of planning and keeping your New Year’s resolutions. For many of us, New Year’s resolutions give us a chance to set personal and career goals that we want to achieve throughout the year. Setting goals, as we know, helps us achieve success because they are measurable and finite – you can look back and say “Yes, I did it!” or “No, I have a ways to go yet!”
So now that we are a few weeks into 2008, it’s time for a health check. Are you doing everything you can to keep your resolutions – your goals – alive and in focus? If you find yourself slipping already, don’t throw in the towel just yet. You wrote your goals down, and that is half the battle. Now you have to put actions to your words and make them happen. Here are a few ways I’ve found to keep New Year’s resolutions alive throughout the year:
- Set up milestones, or mini-resolutions. A milestone is a way of tracking progress. Let’s say your resolution was to advance in your career by either getting a promotion or a substantial raise in the year ahead. Set up milestones such as “Attend workshop on career development” or “Complete Project XYZ by April 1st”. Then as you complete each milestone, mark it off and realize you are now that much closer to making your goal a reality!
- Keep note cards, Post-Its and other little notes where you can see them – in your briefcase, on the refrigerator, or on your monitor at work with your goals written on them. Use them as your daily reaffirmation of the goal. If your goal is to “Lose 30 lbs by 2009,” having these notes serves as a reminder each morning that perhaps eating some toast and a banana is better than having eggs, bacon and hash browns.
- Join a support group – either in your local community or virtually. There is no doubt about it: we all follow through on our goals better if we have others supporting us. Thanks to the internet, there are many virtual support groups you can join where likeminded individuals gather to share ideas and encourage each other on. Likewise, in your local community there might be support groups for career development, small business owners, weight loss and the like that meet every month. Not only will you gain motivation to make your resolutions a success, but you will also expand your personal network by getting to know people who might be in a similar industry or group.
- Realize your mistakes and learn from them. If you find you are straying from your goals, examine what causes you to stray and jump right back on them. Learning from our mistakes is one of the best ways we grow as a person. You’ll find that once you’ve identified the roadblocks to your success you can much more easily avoid them the second time around.
Written by David B. Bohl of Slow Down Fast.
