Was trolling through the Fast Company News bulletins this morning (recommend as a source of general business reading) and came across an article “The Trick to Actually Making Your Resolutions Stick This Year”. Made me laugh, given my post recommending that you Shouldn’t make resolutions..
However, I note the themes are broadly similar between this post and my blog so note these here for convenience:
1. If you set a goal it should be realistic (noting all those years of performance appraisals where objectives had to be SMART? Which everyone tries their level best to ignore – but unless goals and progress against them can be properly reviewed any goal will do).
2. Change a few things not your entire life, success is more likely and successful change will be come habit.
3. Set realistic expectations so you avoid those nagging doubts such as “told you this wasn’t going to work”. Negative self-fulfilling prophecies drain motivation and prevent you making changes to you life that you need to make.
4. Willpower is not enough – PLAN.
5. Get help (use a coach).
6. It’s a marathon not a 100m dash, so some set-backs are to be expected, just don’t read too much into them. Rome wasn’t built in a day and by succeeding in small steps you realise, when you look back, that you have made a lot of progress very quickly…. Remember Peter Jones is onto his second personal fortune, having lost the first one… most of us would have found losing £400mn a bit difficult to deal with. He just shrugged it off and went out and made a £1bn instead… Positive mental attitude can make a lot of difference.
I still wouldn’t recommend resolutions, given the expectation that so many people have that they will fail, even before they start. However as an approach to pursuing a life changing goal, these 6 steps are not a bad starting point, but I would say they are not the only steps either… (see some of my other blogs about lists).
But the key is to have a goal and DO something about it, you’ll quickly find out what works for you – just don’t give up. When you have achieved your first goal, set a second and a third…. that really is the secret of successful people, they know what they want to do and they move to action. Everything else is just dreaming…. Happy New Year!
This post was originally posted by Peter Duffell on LinkedIn.
You’ve imperssed us all with that posting!