1.The first step is to re‐evaluate the previous year. Start by asking yourself “How did it go? How did you handle things? Did you handle yourself the way you wanted to?” Find your answers by evaluating and thinking about the areas we typically struggle with most.
Nutrition/Healthy Eating:
How did you handle yourself with food? Did you do a lot of social/binge/emotional or mindless eating?
Fitness/Exercise:
How was your fitness? Were you motivated, did you enjoy your workouts and did you get the results you wanted?
Stress Control:
How did you handle stress? Who or what was stressful for you and how did you handle it?
Emotional Health/Mindset:
How was your emotional outlook? Were you as positive or optimistic as you would have liked?
Relationships:
Take a look at your relationships. Were they supportive, loving, nurturing or toxic and destructive?
Business/Finances:
How did you do with your business and finances? Did you reach your goals as far as the growth of your business, finances and career?
Personal/Spiritual Development:
Did you grow personally and spiritually? What did you learn and were you living with passion and purpose?
2. Based on the answers you just explored, next determine what you want to accomplish within those same categories. Once you come up with all those answers, be as specific as you can so that what you want becomes clear and very down to the last detail. The more clearly you can determine what you want, the more effectively you can create a plan to get there!
3. This next step is crucial but often overlooked. You want to consider every obstacle you may encounter. While money and time may be some obstacles you discover as you consider each area you want to improve upon, delve a little bit deeper and you may find fear, self-doubt and your current mindset to be the biggest obstacles of all!
4. Once all obstacles are considered, come up with a strategy to overcome every one of them. We often don’t think of what may derail us or what may sabotage us. That’s why when we’re faced with those obstacles for the first time we tend to fall off track. With planning, we can fall of track with a strategy to get back on.
5. After you’ve discovered what it is that you want, it’s helpful to set small, manageable goals based on what you want to achieve and the strategies you just created to get there. The reason why you break it down into small, manageable goals is to prevent overwhelm and encourage success. When you set a goal and you reach it, it builds your confidence and motivates you to continue. That’s not to say the goals should be small…make them huge! Just break them down so you can feel a sense of accomplishment along the way.
6. Lastly, how will you measure and track your progress? How will you reward yourself? Will you monitor your progress and reward yourself daily or weekly? Will you reward yourself when you reach a specific goal or when you handled something in a way that made you proud? What’s important is that you determine, set up and implement a tracking and reward system for many reasons. Besides keeping us motivated to continue, monitoring our progress and rewarding our efforts validates our progress and enables us to see what’s working. It gives us a chance to “course correct” and helps us stay motivated, focused and on track.
How will your year turn out? While many things are out of our control, our thoughts, behaviors and actions are thing we have complete control over. Destructive behaviors can lead us to continue down a path that doesn’t work for us while taking the steps towards creating new, positive behaviors brings us closer to becoming the person that’s been patiently waiting to be unleashed. As always, the choice is ours. Wishing you a great start to your best year yet!
