Are You Making New Year’s Resolutions?

A study of New Year’s Resolutions found that by the end of the first week in January 50% of us will have already given up on our resolutions, and by the end of the month, 83% of us will have given up. In fact, only about 8% of New Year’s Resolutions are actually achieved.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said than “A goal without a plan is just a wish.” Maybe that’s why so many of us fail to keep our resolutions. Our resolutions are simply wishes and not goals.  Or maybe our goals or dreams seem a little overwhelming and we’re not be sure where to start, so we simply don’t.  

I recommend that your start the year by setting as your Breakthrough Goal for the New Year to read Jack Canfield’s

“The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be.”  

The specific Success Principles that deal with Goal Setting are

• Principle   7 – Unleash the Power of Goal-Setting
• Principle   8 – Chunk it Down
• Principle 11 – See What You Want, Get What You See
• Principle 13 – Take Action
• Principle 15 – Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway
• Principle 23 – Practice the Rule of 5

To motivate you to do so, I’ve provided a brief synopsis of Goal Setting program.

GETTING STARTED

In order to achieve your goals, it’s critical that you identify a clear destination – a written vision of what the destination will look like when you achieve your goal.

A clear destination will give you a road to follow and a clear picture of what that destination looks like will help you continue to work towards it. Sometimes the journey towards your goal can get tough, but if you can clearly see what you’re working towards, you’ll be able to gather the motivation to get there.

A great way to start is to visualize your ideal life in the areas of Personal, Financial, Career/Business, Free Time & Family Time, Health & Appearance, Relationships, and Community & Contribution. Create your written vision of what your life with look like in each of those areas, and then write out your goals for each of those areas stating what the goal is, why it’s important to you, and how you plan to achieve it.

After you’ve written out your clear vision of what you want to achieve and your goals, you have moved into the top 3% of the world’s performers. By doing this, you have instructed your subconscious mind to start moving in the direction of your goals, and it will start seeing opportunities to achieve them.

Your goals should be challenging and exciting. Goals that stretch you are the ones that help you become who you want to be. But challenging and exciting goals can seem a little overwhelming and complex. Our comfort zone and our limiting thinking about what’s possible or not possible stops us before we start. Even the most successful people often feel fear or apprehension around a significant goal they’re moving forward on or risk they’re about to take. The difference is this: they don’t let that fear stop them from doing what they most want to do!

“Many people fail to take action because they’re afraid to fail. Successful people, on the other hand, realize that failure is an important part of the learning process.”

So, it’s important that you first get rid of your limiting.

Principle 7 of The Success Principles? encourages you to write down 101 of the goals that you want to achieve in your life, and that one Breakthrough Goal that, if achieved, would be a quantum leap for you? In other words, “Something that changes your life, brings you new opportunities, gets you in front of the right people, and takes every activity, relationship, or group you’re involved in to a higher level.” (The Success Principles?, 54). When thinking about your one Breakthrough Goal, remember

“You can lose material things, but you can never lose your mastery – what you learn and who you become in the process of achieving your goals.”

An effective way of getting rid of any negative thinking that might be stopping you before you start is to break down those seemingly overwhelming challenging and exciting goals into small steps. These small steps will become your action plan for achieving your goals.

In order to identify the specific steps that you’ll need to take, the milestones and landmarks along the way, and create a clear picture of the journey, you’ll need a map to get you to that destination. One tool that can be help you break down your goals is mind mapping.

Begin in the center a blank sheet of paper and write out the goal, then branch out from the goal with all of the ideas that come to mind. You can also branch off of an existing branch with connected ideas. If you run out of rooms for ideas, you can take a specific branch of your map and create a map of its own. That may allow you the space to flesh it out even further. If you start to hit a wall of ideas and can’t think of all the steps, it can be helpful to set it aside for a bit and let your subconscious mind work on it. Coming back to it fresh may yield some new ideas. Additionally, you can ask others to look at your map and suggest anything they see that you don’t. And remember, sometimes it’s unrealistic to expect that we’ll see the complete path before we start to walk it—we may need to start to act on our goasl and on the steps we’ve identified before the path becomes clearer and lights up for us.

In order to move quickly in the direction of your goals, you should make sure that that your goals and action plans give you all of the information that you’ll need to see them clearly, build motivation, and act to get there.  One tool that can help you do these things is the SMART checklist. An effective goal statement, as well as all of the small steps that make up the goal, fit the following criteria:

• Specific: Clearly state what you will achieve.
• Measurable: The criteria for achievement of each step and ultimately the goal is observable and quantifiable.
• Achievable: It stretches you within a realistic window. You have the internal and external resources (or, you can get them) to achieve the goal.
• Relevant: It’s connected to your Purpose, your vision, and your values. It’s relevant to what’s most important to you, and it’s your goal, not someone else’s.
• Time-dimensioned: It lays out a specific time frame for completion. Each step in your action plan and the goal is assigned a specific time frame and completion date.

As you start to see the small, consistent steps that you can take to move toward your goal, you will start to see and feel that it’s possible for you to get there! And you’ll move into the top 1% of the world’s performers.

The best plan does no good until you start to act. When you begin to act, you start to attract the internal and external resources that will help you get there—greater confidence, help from others, new opportunities, useful feedback, and increased momentum.

The first step toward your goal could even be something simple…an easy win that will help you start to taste success with the goal. That in itself will create momentum and increase your desire to continue. You’ll find it’s easy to continue acting once you’ve started.

“Set aside time each and every day to visualize every one of your goals as already complete. This is one of the most vital things you can do to make your dreams come true.”

In The Success Principles?, Principle 23, you’ll learn about the Rule of 5. The Rule of 5 embodies a key principle of successful people…daily consistent effort. If you do five specific things that will move your goal further towards completion, every single day, you will achieve that goal. The things you choose don’t have to be large things. Just identify five things that will get you closer to your goal and do them. Make those five things the highest priority in your day and set aside protected time on your written schedule to do them. Perhaps even do them first before anything else. Don’t go to bed without having completed them.

The tendency might be to put them on the list and hope that you “get to them,” but that’s not enough. If it’s just on the list, the tendency will be to do the things that are screaming loudest for your time and attention—the urgent things, the things for other people. Your goal deserves a higher priority.  

Those small successes towards your goal will infuse your day with enthusiasm, energy, a sense of completion, and positive momentum.

Good luck and let me know how your are doing.