Resolving to Keep Resolutions

Was your dry January actually dry? Were you able to wake up at 6am every morning? Have you managed to work out every day?

Yeah, I tried too.

One month into the New Year, and it’s time to be honest with ourselves: Some of our resolutions might be unwinding. Maybe you spent the last few months of 2016 carefully mulling over your ’17 goals, or maybe you woke up on January 1st with renewed energy and a last-minute resolution. Either way, chances are that something is starting to give. New years are perfect for new starts, but it’s easy to become overwhelmed by everything that we want to overhaul in both our professional and personal lives. Once the excitement to reset wears off, a weird feeling of dread tends to creep in. 

The time to be dreamy about 2017, to think up lofty and potentially impossible year-long goals, may very well be behind us—but eleven opportunistic months lie ahead. Now is our chance to get tenacious, to get to work and embrace a mindset to flip a big-fish goal into a real-world achievement.

Spoiler alert: Most resolutions don’t have an associated silver bullet that fires with ease. In fact, at athenahealth, many business-related resolutions are often established as BHAGs: Big Hairy Audacious Goals. These are our shoot-for-the-moon resolutions, ones that involve a great deal of work and an even greater return. And sometimes, because our BHAGs are so wily and enormous, they’re perceived as almost untouchable. Big, hairy, and audacious, our goals can unknowingly make us frazzled, contributing to a busy and stressful culture that lacks a very tangible human sense of accomplishment.

As goal-setters and success-seekers, we all must institute the underlying assumption that our work creates real value: to ourselves, to team members, and to our companies, organizations, and businesses. Resolutions on paper can’t possibly account for the human interaction that brings them to life. If there isn’t value in what we’re achieving or how we’re achieving it, then our resolutions haven’t been seen through to a truly rewarding end. Accomplishing our New Year’s resolutions means enjoying the journey—learning from our pauses and celebrating our strides.

If you’re starting to feel stressed one month into the year, nervous about large resolutions and looming deadlines, I urge you to think about value over victory. After all, if BHAGs were easy to accomplish, wouldn’t we have accomplished them by now? Digging our heels into the mud and getting tenacious with our audacious work can enable us to remain flexible and achieve the achievable in our journey to tackle the impossible. They say that 92% of people don’t stick to their New Year’s resolutions. Once valuable quality beats out stressful quantity, I think that we can be the successful 8%.

Did you set any business-related New Year’s resolutions? What’s your progress report?