New Year, new plans part deux

Making Good New Year's Resolutions


Then there are some goal-setting strategies that may help. I got this list of tips off a website called mygoals.com.



1. Create a Plan

David Allen, author of Getting Things Done and Making it All Work, says you have to get the day-to-day things working, or you’ll never see past the piles of stuff to do on your desk and to your loftier goals. (That’s the gist of GTD.) But to put it in reverse (this part is from MIAW): purpose/principles, vision, goals, projects, next actions. If one of these parts is missing, you may lose the whole thread. Your new year’s resolution could be as grand as sorting all that out and finally pursuing your vision, or it may be that you’re well underway living your vision AND goals, and just need to set out this year’s projects.


2. Create Your Plan IMMEDIATELY

New Year's Day: Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. ~Mark Twain

Twain might have been overly cynical, but you probably get the point. Putting off starting a goal at any time is a recipe for never getting anywhere with it.


3. Write Down Your Resolution and Plan

Writing things down seems to help our brains look on the goals as more of a commitment if we write them down. It’s also useful to schedule the steps for your goals into your calendar if that’s appropriate (setting aside time to exercise, for example).


4. Think "Year Round," Not Just New Year's

New Year's resolutions should be nothing more than a starting point. Think of them as an outline for your year.


And finally...


5. Remain Flexible

Expect that your plan can and will change. Life has a funny way of throwing unexpected things at us, and flexibility is required to complete anything but the simplest goal. Sometimes the goal itself will even change. In fact, there’s a good chance that if it does, you’ll most likely recognize that at some step, you misidentified something in your big picture: maybe your vision isn’t to bring the world a better mousetrap, maybe it’s to rid the world of mice.

But also recognize the progress you do make—sometimes we underestimate how long something will take. Going slowly isn’t a failure unless you’re trying to beat everyone else—if your goal is to finish the race, then you can work on your timing next year.

Another tip for visualization success: when you picture where you want to be a year from now -- or ever, as we start talking about vision and purpose in the big picture -- don't just imagine the visual. Imagine the emotion. The visual isn't nearly as important. If your purpose is to, for example, bring healing to the world, don't just focus on how you'll look in nurses' scrubs or a white lab coat. Imagine how it will feel to change a life.

As you may have guessed by now, although my goal with this blog is to help you find and fulfill your passion, we'll spend a fair amount of energy also talking about the day-to-day stuff. Those down-and-dirty details are what will help you realize your vision.

New Year, new plans

"We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched.  Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives... not looking for flaws, but for potential. ~ Ellen Goodman

The new calendar year is a good time to set new plans / goals of your own in motion; you know, take advantage of the momentum created by everyone thinking, talking, and doing the same thing. Of course, when other appropriate times for reevaluation come up (more on this over the next several months), putting things off UNTIL the new year is just making excuses and giving in to fear or complacency.

As promised, today and tomorrow I'm going to drop in here an article (in two parts) I wrote for my company newsletter. It's pretty standard goal-setting information, but hopefully you can glean something helpful from it...and feel free to leave questions in the comments section.


New Year’s Resolutions: Making a list and checking it twice?


It’s like an annual curse we visit on ourselves: we make our new year’s resolutions, then follow it up with the promise that Santa’s also “making a list” to check up on us.

Never mind that Santa is just as mythological a figure as the successful new year’s resolution (that is, the odds seem to be against his/its existence, although there are claims to the contrary).

The numbers: 40 to 45% of American adults make one or more resolutions each year. Top resolutions include weight loss, quitting smoking, saving money, and paying off debt. After six months, fewer than half the people making resolutions are sticking to the plan. And yet, the same studies show that people making resolutions are 10 times more likely to attain their goals than people who don’t explicitly make resolutions.

Okay, maybe a slightly-less-than-half rate of adherence isn’t all that bad. But how can you up YOUR odds of being one of the successful ones?


What would I do over?

First, psychologists say to recognize that what you’re doing is making a change. Duh. You knew that, right? But it seems a lot of us act as if change happens to us, not by us. Change is hard. It requires the repetition of the new behavior many times before the change is set—perhaps six months down the road. We get set in the old behavior. It’s comfortable to us, and even if we know it’s not good for us, even if we really, really want to do something different, it’s tough to create that new pattern of behavior.

Second, some suggest that looking deeper than the behavior you’re changing can help. For example, say you want to quit smoking. One way to look at it is all the good things you’re creating in your life by dropping that habit. Another way is to think of it this way: what do I want to be different? One psychologist uses this with clients about to undergo plastic surgery, because it really targets the motivation. Back to smoking. What do I want to be different? Or, as Miller does with her clients, what do I wish were different from my past? Did you start smoking to be cool, as so many high schoolers do? Stress relief? If those are still valid desires, can you replace the smoking with healthier options? (Yoga is very trendy, and accomplishes both at once! And I can guarantee you, you can’t smoke and do a hot yoga practice at the same time, what with the whole breathing thing.)

Navel-gazing not for you? Think about things you’d like to be doing, and why, and how they do or do not fit in with what you’re doing now.

Take some time over the next few days--just a break from the holiday bustle--to think about where you'd really, really like to be this time next year. Tomorrow, we'll jump into some tips for successful goal setting and achieving.

Moving forward

Seems sort of apropos that the last post (nine months ago!) was about making choices and discovering not only what suits us, but what doesn't.


I spent most of this past year exploring that latter bit. I now know LOTS of things that don't fit my visioned path, because I spent a good chunk of my time doing them. Not intentionally. Or at least, not with my highest and best intentions!

Drifting into life "at the last minute." We do this a lot. Or at least I do this a lot, and I doubt that I'm the only one. Life at the last minute is life in what Stephen Covey calls "urgent" (some important, others not, so I'm not going to assign it a specific quadrant).In other words, we're doing things when they HAVE to get done: bills paid "at the last minute." Gift shopping or holiday prepping "at the last minute." Walking at the door at the last minute that gets us to work within five minutes of being on time, not taking the car to the shop until we can't ignore that noise or us to the hospital because that pesky cough won't go away.

It's life according to deadline, which is something I'm very good at. It comes in handy sometimes, because it does mean you don't freeze at the thought of a deadline, but if you aren't careful, they sneak up on you because you're so busy dealing with the rest of the "last minute" that you don't put in the time you need to on the next thing.

This hurts when you're trying to, say, write a novel while you're doing edits for the last one. Or plan a new campaign for your business while you're struggling to figure the ROI in time for the board of directors meeting on the last campaign.

One of the things we'll explore over the coming weeks is how to move out of "last minute" living and into living in the present (the two are not the same), while creating the next "present" (aka planning for / creating the future).

Having spent a fair amount of time this year doing things that don't move me toward my goals had this effect: in the midst of grumbling to myself about it over the past few days, it narrowed down for me the focus of this blog: over the next several months, we'll be talking about things that center on conscious lifestyle choices (not just mine, but any interesting ones I come across, such as minimalism) and how we make choices that move us in the direction of our passions, of broadening our vision but narrowing our focus. We'll talk about hopes and fears and overcoming the challenges of both. I hope to do some interviews with people who found their passion, the later in life the better, and how they turned dreaming into living. Their conscious sanity.

Welcome back.

To do today

Today's to-do list contains the usual mundane items: some things I need to do for work, cleaning, working out, steps to do on various writing projects and for a couple of professional associations I belong to.

I like to-do lists. I look at mine frequently, throughout the day. So I've started adding reminders to mine, more amorphous "to-do" items that aren't going to really get crossed off the list. Yesterday, I added "be aware of synchronicity" to mine. It's on there again today, so every time I look at that list, I'm reminded to bring synchronicity to the forefront of my attention. I've added "be aware of beauty," and one I snagged off Danielle LaPorte's blog several months ago--"French kiss life."

What's on your to-do list?

Intention: Focus

Yesterday at one of the conference sessions, we were listening to a leader from a large local company talk about corporate responsibility, and something he said really resonated with me on a personal level. He laid out the areas his company keeps at the forefront of their mission, and spoke of one of them as being truly central. Everything they do comes back to, is evaluated in the light of, this particular part of their mission. Everything.

I've done personal mission statements before, although it's not one of my favorite activities. How do you boil every part of your life down to one core mission? Perhaps it requires a big enough mission: save the planet, serve Spirit, entertain, heal, share knowledge, inspire creative people. Something like that. Substitute the word "intention" if you like.

And then, no matter what your mission is, bring everything you do back to that. Intention: live a life that is consciously sane. If you know what constitutes 'sanity' for you (or me, since this is my intention)--physical, mental, and emotional well-being, connection to inspiration (connected to Spirit), healing, creative and independent--then you do your best to consciously bring it all back to those points, those core values, asking yourself: am I awake in the world? am I connected? does this serve to make me healthy, happy, feeling the love? does this further one of my mundane goals?