How can you set yourself up for a great year?
It’s a new year, a new opportunity to evaluate and tweak or redesign where needed.
Let’s start with the areas that are going well in your life. What is it you need to keep doing so that that can continue to go well? Sometimes awareness of what you’re already doing well can be very affirming and great encouragement for us to keep up the great work. And what is it that you could add in or enhance in order to strengthen it further? Sometimes a couple of small but well placed tweaks are all that’s needed to take something and make it better.
What about the areas that are not going as well as you’d like? Where would you like to make some changes? Work? Family? Relationships? Health and fitness? Spirituality? And what is the best way to go about making changes in that area?
Firstly, start with a really clear vision. What is it that you want to achieve? What would you be doing if you had successfully made the change? How would you be behaving differently, how would you be responding differently, how would you be thinking differently if you had successfully made the change? Really build your goal and make it clear. Every time we think about something we are giving instructions to our unconscious minds, so we want to make sure we are giving ourselves great instructions that are really clear and easy to follow.
Once your vision is clear, it’s time to break it down into actionable steps. What is it you need to do to achieve this? What is the first step, the first thing you need to do to begin the path of creating this change? This first step should be small, something that is quick, easy and incredibly doable, so that you can act on it within 24 hours of deciding on it. It could be as simple as writing your goal down, telling a friend, or mapping out how the change might happen. Once it’s done, the process of change has begun. It’s then a matter of moving on to the second step, and putting that into action also.
What if your goal is huge? In that case, I’d really recommend breaking it down and concentrating on one thing at a time. Trying to make too many changes at one time can be overwhelming and once you drop one ball, chances are you’ll drop the whole lot. Choose one thing to change, just one, be consistent with that change, and then move on to the next. Every change is in itself significant, and together they really add up over time. Making those changes one at a time is also far more manageable for us, far more sustainable over time, and far more likely to lead to success.
