What Was I Thinking?
Upon reflection, during the Holidays, we become determined to make changes at work and personally in the New Year. Perhaps choosing goals to exercise, eat better, lose weight, or plans to build stronger relationships, pay off debt, and maybe goals to change work and personal habits for a better life and work experience. Then we find ourselves back at work with all the projects, emails, and problems we left last year.
What we forget is how we will fit them all into our already full schedule. Those December intentions lead to January’s overwhelm. We then promise ourselves we will start “tomorrow,” and tomorrow never comes.
A client recently wanted to talk about turning her inaction into action in accomplishing all the goals she shared with me.
The following steps she committed to will help anyone wanting to achieve their new goals but become discouraged.
Prioritizing Is Key
Review your goals, prioritizing them according to their importance, just like you would do with determining which tasks you would tackle first.
Determine Action Steps
What are the high-level action steps for each goal? You don’t need to go too deep at this point. It will give you a firm grasp of what you need to do overall.
The Domino Effect
Looking at the steps needed to accomplish your goals, does a step in one goal impact another goal? For instance, one of my client’s objectives is a weight goal, and another to pay off debt. As we talked through the steps, she realized that as she loses weight, she will be able to sell clothing that no longer fits, as one of several ways to reduce debt.
The 1% Rule
Change is always a challenge. It is uncomfortable. Take teenie actions.
If you want to organize your email box and it looks like a herculean task (One colleague had over 10,000 emails in his box!), take maybe 50 or 100 a day (or whatever feels right to you), file them, delegate them, defer them, or delete them. If they have been there quite a while and you are not sure what to do with them, I vote for deletion. It feels good too!
If you want to gain endurance, park farther from the building as a first step.
What small step can you take to begin work on your top goal?
Final Points
- Schedule time for the action(s) you want to accomplish during the week on your calendar. A friend scheduled time to write her blog on her calendar to commit to the importance of her writing. Otherwise, writing was not on top of her mind while she focused on other tasks.
- Schedule a debrief on where you are with the steps you committed to taking for the week. Did you do well? Congratulate yourself! Could you do better? You did something so congratulate yourself!
- Are you willing to add to those actions in the following week?
- Most importantly, are you still enthusiastic about doing something to achieve your goal?
To keep your commitment to change, taking little steps can make all the difference! The secret is to keep pushing forward, no matter how small. Don’t stop!
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