3 Tips to Help You Realize Your Goals and Objectives

How are you doing on those New Year Resolutions?

We’re now three weeks into the New Year and for many of you, those resolutions have already been swept under the carpet. Old habits are difficult to change and yet we all understand that continuing to do what we’ve done in the past, provides us with a high degree of probability of achieving the same results. This year I want to encourage you to try something different. I’d like to share with you 3 tips that I’ve come to learn from working with a number of great Canadian leaders over the past 25 years. Trust me – we all have the ability to improve the likelihood of realizing our resolutions and/or goals and objectives.

Three Tips to allow you to realize your New Year’s Resolution and/or Goals and Objectives:

1. Create a goal (3 at the most) that maybe considered a stretch although you truly BELIEVE it is attainable with some effort and focus. Write it down and be concise about what you would like to achieve (keep it to 10 words or less), quantify how you will measure your success, and state the date you plan to accomplish it. Finally print it out and place it somewhere that will be visible to you every day. Depending on the goal – if you really want to enhance the chances of your success, share and display that goal where others can also see it. I call that the Peer Pressure Effect.
2. On a separate piece of paper or on your electronic device – take each of those goals noted above and create 3 processes (3 actions) that you will perform on a daily and/or weekly basis that will move you a step closer to achieving your goals and objectives. Fear not – these 3 processes are not set in stone; they can be adjusted over time to enhance their effectiveness. Take time each week and reflect if there is something that you can do to improve that process and/or simply replace it with another more effective process.
3. Record and journalize how well you performed on those 3 processes. You can do this on a daily or weekly basis. The key here is to RECORD on a scale of 1 to 10 how well you believed you performed on those processes. Nobody has to see your self-evaluations, so be honest and consistent in how you record your results. Finally over a period of a week (if you evaluate yourself everyday) or a month, compile the results and take a look at the trend. If you’re moving in the right direction celebrate the success. If you’re trending the other way – well then you have a decision to make. You can either reintroduce some effort and focus, or simply call it a day and understand that you’ve just made the decision that the goal/objective was really not that important. Did I mention perseverance is one of the key attributes of successful leaders.

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