The new year is right around the corner, and whether you believe in new year resolutions or not, I hope you’ll start the new year with the attitude to make 2020 your best year yet.
The new year is right around the corner, and whether you believe in New Year’s resolutions or not, I hope you’ll start the new year with the attitude to make 2020 your best year yet.
I’m sick of people saying they don’t believe in ‘New Year’s Resolutions’ because you need to commit to getting better all the time. And that’s great if you can actually do that. But I guarantee the majority of the people who take the anti- New Year’s resolution stance, just use it as an excuse to not do anything differently or better at all.
Lets face it, a new year is an easy to remember milestone. If on December 31st you say to yourself ‘I’m going to lose 5kg in 3 months and on March 31st you still weigh the same amount, it’s just easy math to know you didn’t reach your target.
Now I’m not saying you need to declare your New Year’s resolution is to double your income in 2020 with no clear path to it, because as we all know, this only sets you up for failure.
What I would like to see instead, is you set aside a few hours or a few days to get crystal clear about what you want to accomplish in 2020. Start with that big scary goal, then, more importantly, figure out how you’re going to do to make that happen.
Break that goal down into monthly and weekly action plans that move you towards your larger goal.
If you’re in sales, and you want to increase your commissions by 50%, start by figuring out what needs to happen to reach that.
Do you need to learn how to do something better, do you need to build more relationships or partnerships, do you need to increase your sale amount, repeat business or is it all of the above?
Whatever it’s going to take, be clear on what needs to happen to reach your goal, and break it down into monthly or weekly goals so each month you’re working on doing 1 thing better instead of trying to reach your goal without a manageable plan.
Elaine and I like to come up with a theme for the year that all of our goals revolve around. Some of our themes in the past have included ‘brand’, ‘processes’ and ‘people’. We then come up with 2-3 major goals around the theme, before breaking it down into monthly goals, which get put into our calendar so we’re always clear about what we’re working towards.
Now the hardest and most important piece of all of this is reviewing on a weekly basis how you’re progressing towards your goals. It’s very easy to get distracted by what’s happening in front of you, the urgent issues on hand, that you lose sight of the bigger, harder to achieve goals.
But not you, not this year. Because my hope for you is that you will set aside the time to plan, document and implement your goals in 2020 and on December 31st 2020, I want to hear what you did to achieve your goals.