What are your New Year’s resolutions?

It is that time again where we take pen to paper and write down our list of resolutions for the upcoming year.  It is a worthwhile exercise to do; taking time to think about what you want to do differently this year and sticking to it.  It is the sticky part that often gets un-glued.  We either have not fully appreciated how difficult it is to change our patterns,  have not committed to changing, or make the list so long that we just get frustrated with the number of resolutions we need to accomplish.  The list simply overwhelms us and we end up doing nothing or accomplishing very little.  It can be frustrating and eventually we give up writing down our resolutions.  Don’t get frustrated-don’t give up.  If you would like to change your outlook to New Year’s resolutions, take action and get different results, read on.

Here are a few tips and ideas that have helped make my resolutions a reality:

1.  Re-frame the exercise. Instead of calling them resolutions, call them goals. Most of us have goals we want to reach. They can be professional, personal, spiritual, or financial. When I think back why I was successful achieving my goals, it was due to:

2.  Review your goals daily.  I committed to spending no more than 10 minutes each day reviewing my goals and the actions.  This helped me stay accountable to my vision of what I wanted to achieve.   Leaders need a vision of where their organization’s are going. They also need their own personal vision of what they want  to accomplish for themselves, for their families and others.  Reviewing your goals daily will enable you to stay focused on achieving your goals and will help you to make adjustments to your plans based on other priorities or emergencies that will eventually come up.

3.  Keep your goal setting simple.  Keep your goals to a minimum.  I never had more than three goals for each domain. Often times it was just one or two goals that I could commit to.

4. Share your goals with others.  I would often share my goals with my wife, children, or an accountability partner. I would always share my professional goals with my immediate boss and my mentor.  My professional goals were not similar to my corporate goals, but were focused on specific leadership skills, experiences, competencies that I wanted to develop or strengthen.

Change is difficult and we all resist it. Goals, resolutions, dreams can never be realized unless we are committed to achieving them.  If you are finding it difficult to make a commitment, reflect on why it is so difficult for you; and/or go to Harvard Business Review’s website www.hbr.org and purchase an article by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey called “The Real Reason People Won’t Change.  It is an excellent article that provides extremely helpful information and tools to use to help you uncover what might be getting in the way of you making a commitment to change.

If you follow my simple steps and commit to them, I assure you, that you will no longer get frustrated or quit writing down your goals and aspirations. You will also achieve very different and positive results. 

To all my readers, Happy New Year and may 2011 be a productive, fulfilling and  fruitful year!