If you did make new year’s resolutions, you have an excellent starting point.
If you did not make new year’s resolutions, you have an excellent starting point.
Upgrading your new year’s resolutions means to define them as actions you can take towards achieving your goals.
New year’s resolutions do not work because by their nature, their start is time bound, not readiness bound. In other words, you expect change to start happening on the first day of January, irrespective of how ready you are to make the change. You want change because you want to achieve something that is well defined, but you did not define how to get it, so you make new year’s resolutions as a solution. This does not work because many times, the new year’s resolutions are not correctly defined.
Action: instead of making new year’s resolutions, upgrade them to success resolutions.
Shift to measurable actions that bring you closer to achieving success, whatever your definition of success might be.
Success resolutions need to be aligned with your goals. If you want to lose weight, a good success resolution can be: “eat two meals a day”. If you want to feel fit, you might set your resolution as: “exercise five times a week for 30 minutes”. If you want to increase your public speaking abilities, your success resolution might be: “I speak in a meeting at least once a week”. If you want to set up your own business, you might opt for: “take one action for your own business every day”. Notice how success resolutions need to repeat with a certain frequency – they are actions you commit to do repeatedly, to get you closer to your goal.
Success resolutions also have checkpoints. Set aside time to check your progress by asking yourself: “how do I know this resolution works?” or “what results do I want this success resolution to bring me?”.
The new year is a good time to reflect and check the progress on your success resolutions. But you can initiate, change and complete success resolutions any time of the year.
Because you are the only one responsible for your success!
