It’s Time to Quit Quitting…For Good

How are those New Year’s resolutions going for you? If, a month into the new year, you’re holding strong and sticking to the plan you set out for yourself on December 31, 2022, congratulations! That’s AWESOME – and rare.

If your resolutions have fallen by the wayside, don’t worry, you’re not alone. According to Strava research, most people give up on their New Year’s resolutions on or by January 12 (which is already ages ago). That’s only 12 days of stick-to-it-ness, which isn’t long enough to make significant progress toward anything.

So why is quitting so pervasive? Think about your business. Every year, I talk to advisors who set goals to grow revenue, deliver more value to clients and run more efficient firms.

But what do we all end up doing? Spending most of our time on activities that are not energy-creating or revenue-producing (spoiler alert: it’s at the intersection of these two things that magic happens), leaving little time to focus on change. The truth is, we’re hard-wired to resist the very change that would drive mind-blowing results for us and our businesses.?

Instead, we stay stuck, spending at least 50% of our time:

• Checking emails
• Doing $50 service work
• Procrastinating
• Getting lost in distractions

Those are comfortable tasks and states of being. Checking email, for example, makes us feel like we’re being productive and accomplishing something when in reality, we’re avoiding the work that would actually get us closer to what we want to achieve.

Someone once said to me, “Stephanie, if you want to be more successful, get used to being more uncomfortable.” By definition, if you want to create your next level of success this year, you'll need to break things on purpose. You need to think differently, decide differently and behave differently.

In short, if you want to crush your goals, you need to find where it is you’re most uncomfortable, and stay there.

To embracing the uncomfortable!