Achieve Your New Year's Resolutions

I want to share a very important piece of wisdom with you: You will never accomplish anything… if you never start. There is great power in beginning. I don’t know many people who don’t have at least a few goals for themselves unfortunately; the number of those people who have actually done anything about those goals is far too small. Oh sure we think about working on our goals, we dream about achieving those goals, but we rarely do anything about them.

As New Year's 2010 starts to fade from memory, this week's article is about helping you to set and achieve some resolutions that will really make a difference in your life in the next 11 1/2 months. Over the next few weeks we'll address a few of the key steps needed to make your resolutions a reality. The first one is simply this: Get Started!

How often have you said to yourself, “I really should …”? Whether it was travel, work less, begin an exercise program, write a book, we’ve all had goals and then for one reason or another failed to achieve them. Often the reason we fail is that we can’t complete the most important step; start.

It sounds simple but in fact sometimes starting is the hardest part. It’s easy to get so overwhelmed and intimidated by the scope of what needs to be done, that you just don’t know what to do first. Another problem people encounter is that they make the mistake of thinking that action follows motivation, but there’s no reason that the opposite won’t work just as well.

The problem with waiting to be motivated before you start is sometimes you just can’t get motivated. Instead of waiting for the inspiration to start working on your goals, just start. If you get things going, motivation will follow

Action Item

First make a list of a few major goals you have for your life. Now, figure out what would be the first three steps that you’d have to take to accomplish each of these goals and write them down underneath the goal. For example, if your goal is to write a book, set aside an hour each day, to write. Take the phone off the hook, turn the TV off, and write.

Don’t get tripped up by trying to figure out what the perfect first step is. Just write something down (you can always change it if you need to). In this situation, the key isn’t what you do, just that you do something.

Goal 1

a)

b)

c)

Goal 2

a)

b)

c)

Goal 3

a)

b)

c)

What you’ve just done is create your TO DO list for your next year. You should now have nine things that you can DO today to start making your resolutions come true. Don’t allow yourself to get overwhelmed by the whole project, just pick the first thing on the list and get started!