Tag Archive for: new year
Over the course of my career I’ve assembled a very handy annual New Year’s “Checklist” that helps get me focused and ready for the challenges to come in the days and months ahead, and well positioned for success.
Usually the first thing everyone talks about when the New Year rolls around is their New Year’s resolutions. What didn’t happen during the previous year and resolving to make it happen during the coming year; promising to become happier, healthier, wealthier, or more productive; promising to take more time for your family or yourself — all noble resolutions to be sure, but somewhat less than certain that they will ever come to pass.
So it's one thing to set the goal, it's a whole other animal to actually finish; to cross the finish line ... Here are the steps to crossing the finish line:
An eminent social psychologist offers insight into how goals work and the sources of self-defeating behaviors, and provides strategies for problem solving, achieving resiliency, and increasing willpower.
Just in time for New Year's resolutions, learn how to reach your goals-finally-by overcoming the many hurdles that have defeated you before.
Most of us have no idea why we fail to reach our goals. Now Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson, an award-winning, rising star in the field of social psychology shows us how to overcome the hurdles that have defeated us before.
Dr. Grant Halvorson offers counterintuitive insights, illuminating stories, and science-based information that anyone can use immediately, including how to:
• Set a goal to pursue "even" in the face of adversity
• Build willpower, which can be strengthened like a muscle
• Avoid the kind of positive thinking that makes people fail
The strategies outlined in this book will not only help everyone reach their own goals but will also prove invaluable to parents, teachers, coaches, and employers. Dr. Grant Halvorson shows readers a new approach to problem solving that will change the way they approach their entire lives.
Even very smart, very accomplished people are very bad at understanding why they succeed or fail.
Whether you want to motivate your kids, your employees, or just yourself, "Succeed" unlocks the secrets of achievement, and shows you how to create new possibilities in every area of your life.
You can watch this video for a useful summary of some of the most relevant points Dr Halvorson makes:
About the author: Dr Heidi Grant Hulvorson is a social psychologist who researches, writes, and speaks about the science of motivation. She is the Associate Director of the Motivation Science Center at the Columbia Business School, and author of the best-selling books: Succeed: How We Can All Reach Our Goals, Nine Things Successful People Do Differently, Focus: Use Different Ways of Seeing The World for Success and Influence (co-written with E. Tory Higgins), and The 8 Motivational Challenges.
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Every successful person we know sets goals. But what's the secret behind of the power of goal setting they know but you don't know? This article reveals the 4 benefits that you may not have ever imagined.
Have you ever heard of any successful people, super achievers or elite performers who don't set goals at all?
Honestly I have not.
Goal setting is an important aspect in both your professional and personal lives. Without having goals to strive for, we won't be able to measure our success or achievements. We won't be able to spot our weaknesses and improve ourselves. We won't be able to target our strengths and fully unleash our potential.
While setting goals is crucial to getting what you want in life, what other amazing benefits do this simple act bring you that make all the successful people love?
#1 Control and Certainty
By regularly setting goals and achieving them you are taking control of your life.
This is an empowering mindset, attitude and behavior to have because you are acknowledging that life doesn't 'just happen to you'. There is a lot that is within your control when it comes to creating the ideal life you want and working towards the direction that's right for you.
#2 Optimism and Positivity
Apart from being certain about the future you're heading, setting goals and taking action to achieve them will influence you to have a more positive and optimistic outlook.
This vibe of positivity will help you build stronger mental resilience, which is essential to help you keep going when things become tough or when you got hit by challenges.
Instead of feeling down, depressed or defeated by the hardships, your resilience, optimism and mental toughness will ensure that you see the temporary setback as it is and pick yourself up using your personal power to find a creative way to overcome it.
#3 Wellbeing
Through goal setting you will have created a long-term plan for your life. In your mind, you've created a vision of what you want and worked out a way to get there.
This sense of purpose gives you a feeling of hope that you can achieve what you want. These are all positive emotions which have powerful effects on your mental and physical wellbeing.
Stress levels will be reduced, as will the likelihood of depression emerging. While you are working towards achieving your goals, you will increase your levels of focus and your ability to use it at will to help you get the results you want.
#4 Getting Into Flow State
The regular setting of meaningful goals ensures that you maximize opportunities to utilize the power of flow.
This miraculous flow state occurs when:
- you have a meaningful goal;
- position yourself away from external distractions;
- have all the necessary resources at hand;
- have matched the task to your abilities so that it contains enough challenge to keep you motivated and engaged but not too little so that you become bored; and
- immerse yourself in the task completely.
Getting into the flow state not only helps you achieve goals, but it also drastically elevates your productivity, relieves stress and increases happiness. The benefits of the flow state have been recorded by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the Hungarian positive psychologist who wrote the famous book <Flow: The Psychology of Happiness>.
By having goals, you are increasing your chances of success. You are also taking positive steps to creating the life or business that you want.
While it seems to take a lot of effort setting goals at the beginning, the benefits you experience will far outweigh any time spent creating, monitoring and meeting them. If you desire to become a more productive, optimistic and proactive, then you should definitely follow what other successful people do - setting goals.
If you REALLY do not know the 5 Little Known Ways To Double Your Productivity yet, we need to fix that. Join hundreds of other guys already using it right now FREE in my step-by-step training. Alternatively, check out my value-packed productivity blog here.
Today ...
Are you crushing it...knocking the ball out of the park...and off to a blazing start?
Or...are you repeating the same patterns as last year...barely squeaking by...and in serious need of more, better and faster results?
Regardless of your answer, I'm going to share with you a simple, seven-step strategy for taking your performance to an entirely new level.
I just used it to evaluate my YTD performance and implementing the feedback into my plans for the month of February.
It's called an AFTER ACTION REVIEW (AAR), and it's purpose is to...
1. Celebrate and sustain strengths as you must reinforce the tactics and strategies responsible for winning.
2. Identify and correct deficiencies as it is imperative that you analyze behaviors which are compromising performance.
3. Focus on opportunities to exploit and goals to pursue for the remaining 335 days of the year.
DO IT NOW
To best position yourself, your family and business for the remainder of the year, you NEED to perform an AAR and analyze what took place in the first half of the year, and...YOU NEED TO DO IT NOW!
You NEED to identify every nugget of knowledge your past performance offers and milk it for all it's worth.
Please note the special emphasis on the word NEED, as if you hesitate to do this exercise or simply choose to delete this message, you'll most certainly pay the heavy price associated with neglect, ignorance and immaturity.
Unfortunately the vast majority of people and companies don't learn enough from their mistakes or their accomplishments.
It's like everyone is simply plugging along with their heads down, and it's Ground Hog Day all over again.
But, instead of repeating the same day over and again, both companies and individuals continue to repeat the same undermining attitudes, the same unproductive strategies and keep getting the same under-performing results.
IT"S TIME FOR A REALITY CHECK
You and I both know that no matter how good or bad your results have been these past 30 days - you can always do better—MUCH BETTER!
Yet, the single biggest key to improving both your performance and your results seems to go ignored by almost everybody. If you want to perform at the top of your game you NEED to review, analyze, and learn from what has already happened.
MASTER THESE SEVEN STEPS
There are seven steps in the AAR process, and you must begin implementing the ideas that you are about to generate...IMMEDIATELY.
Step 1 - Identify Your Three Greatest Accomplishments in the year so far.
Even if the first month of the year has been a challenging one for you, odds are...if you look close enough, there's something to be proud of.
Step 2 - Analyze What You Learned from Each Accomplishment?
Now that you have identified your three greatest accomplishments, go back to each one. This time though identify exactly what you learned or were reminded of by each of them.
Step 3 - Identify Your Biggest Disappointments in the year until now.
Practically every company and individual resists analyzing their mistakes. That's a shame because this is where the best learning comes from.
Step 4 - Analyze What You Learned from Each Failure or Disappointment.
No matter how great everything in life is going -we all make mistakes. The trick here is to analyze them, what preceded them, what could you have done differently and determine how can you prevent them from reoccurring in the future.
Step 5 - Identify How You Limited Yourself and How Can You Stop It?
Were there certain actions you took or didn't take that came back to haunt you?
In order to make sure you don't limit yourself again - you need to bring these self-defeating actions and self-limiting beliefs to the surface,confront them, and most importantly determine what you must do differently to make sure you don't make the same mistakes all over again.
Step 6 - Pragmatically Review the Information You Have Gathered?
The goal of this exercise is not simply to know yourself and your business better, but to actually use the information to make certain that you are best positioned for a strong first quarter and year, and that you have an actionable plan that far surpasses anything you have done in the first 30 days of 2015.
HOW DID YOU DO?
- What are the big takeaways from answering each question?
- What do you know about yourself or your business that you didn't realize or weren't thinking about?
Obviously, having this list isn't going to do it all, you still need to take this new knowledge and USE IT!
Fortunately, that's what the last question is centered around.
And here it is...
Step 7 - Determine How to Use This Information to Astonish Yourself in the year that is left
The purpose here is to build into your schedule,your interactions, your management style or whatever else you've surfaced in the previous questions and build yourself a new, better approach.
Okay, now that we've uncovered a lot of useful information, the final step is to incorporate it into a game plan for crushing the first quarter of the year.
My goal is simply to help you achieve yours, and the single best thing I can do for you (now that the first half of the year is in the history books) is to impress upon you the importance and URGENCY of this AAR discipline.
Implementing the seven steps of the AAR before you get into work on Monday will go a long way in helping you making this the best year of your life.
I wish for you a lifetime of abundance, prosperity and ever increasing opportunity.
One where you make sure...
Everything Counts!
Gary Ryan Blair
It's a wise custom to end an old year and begin a new one with serious self-reflection.
What did you learn this year that could improve your life and make you a wiser and better person?
If you want to have a successful and fulfilling New year, start by examining the way you think and feel about your job, your relationships, and yourself. After all, the single most important factor in personal happiness and your impact on others is your attitude.
In the geometry of life, the axiom is "positive attitudes produce positive results." They make success more likely, failures less harmful, pleasures more frequent, and pain more bearable. Some people tend to bring warm sunshine wherever they go; others bring cold chills. What do you bring?
To find out where you can improve, take an inventory of your predispositions, the attitude you're most likely to start with:
Are you generally optimistic or pessimistic?
Do you tend to assume the best or expect the worst of people?
Is your first instinct to be empathetic or judgmental?
Is your first instinct to be supportive or critical?
Do you send the message that you enjoy life or that you're barely enduring it?
Do you come across as the captain of your own ship or simply a passenger?
Wherever you are on the positive-attitude spectrum, think how much better things could be if you were more consistently and self-consciously optimistic, empathetic, supportive, grateful, enthusiastic, hopeful, and cheerful.
So why not resolve to think, act, and speak more positively about yourself, your family, your coworkers, and everyone else in your life?
This is Michael Josephson reminding you that character counts.
Michael Josephson
www.charactercounts.org
Thinking about New Year's resolutions - easy;
Making good resolutions - hard;
Keeping your resolutions - priceless.
You start off hopeful. You want to do better. You want to be better. You're tired of your life being one long disconnect between what you want to do and what you get around to doing.
But then reality kicks in. Like a Hamlet in the world of action, you find yourself torn between two impulses: "to do or not to do." Such ambivalence makes it tough to choose a clear commitment to action. So what happens?
Your positive energy becomes dammed, damning you to yet one more failed resolution. Your determination dissipates. It's too hard. It's too burdensome. Why kid yourself? Are you really going to shed those pounds? Get yourself in shape? Be more organized? Work more efficiently?
You surrender. It's not going to happen. You become cynical. It's stupid to make New Year's resolutions. They don't work. They're a waste of time - especially in the digital age. Beepers beckon, digital devices ding, social networks seduce. With all those accessible, appealing, addictive distractions, how does anybody stick to their resolutions?
You give up. You go back to spending countless hours immersed in activity that has nothing to do with your personal or career goals. No big deal. You only go around once, right? Why not just give in to your impulse of the moment?
Yet in those infrequent but quiet moments of solitude when you're honest with yourself, you wonder if you're teetering on the edge of the Boulevard of Broken Dreams. You know you can do better. Why give up on yourself?
This year, make resolutions that work by staying away from these three types of resolutions:
- Resolutions that are way too ambitious. Sure, you want to bring about dramatic change. Unfortunately, change doesn't work that way.
Instead of resolving to lose 30 pounds, aim simply to lose 5 pounds in January. But what if your goal really is to lose 30 pounds? Lose the 5 in January. Rejoice in your success. When you do, you'll be motivated to continue whatever you've been doing to lose the weight. Why? Because nothing succeeds like success.
- Resolutions that feel like hard work. You want to get in shape but hate going to the gym. You pay for a gym membership and promise yourself you'll go. Yeah, right. Gyms get rich on people like you. If you hate the gym, don't go.
Instead of insisting that you should do what you dislike, find a physical activity that you enjoy. Maybe it's a sport. Or a martial arts program. Or yoga. Or Pilates. Or dancing. Or cycling. Squash the "Yes, but" excuses. Just begin. And notice how much better you feel when you move your body.
- Resolutions that are conceptual. "I want to get more organized," is a good concept. Who wouldn't want to be more organized? (Okay, maybe if you're a nitpicking perfectionist, you might wish you were less organized).
Instead of focusing on the concept, hone in on specific actions you can take that will result in your being more organized.
Here are examples of action-oriented tasks that will enable you to reach your goal:
-
- "I'll spend 15 minutes every day organizing papers on my desk."
- "I'll discard at least 10 items of clothing that I no longer wear every change of season."
- "I'll visit an office supply store to purchase organizing aids for my junk drawers."
Now, are you ready? Ready for what? Ready to make sustainable resolutions that will nurture your best self. Anybody against that?
Copyright © 2011: Linda Sapadin, Ph.D
Linda Sapadin, Ph.D. is a psychologist and success coach who specializes in helping people overcome self-defeating patterns of behavior. If your life is one long disconnect between what you intend to do and what you actually get around to doing, check out my new book, How to Beat Procrastination in the Digital Age.
Linda Sapadin, Ph.D. is a psychologist and success coach who specializes in helping people overcome self-defeating patterns of behavior. If your life is one long disconnect between what you intend to do and what you actually get around to doing, check out my new book, How to Beat Procrastination in the Digital Age.
At my website SixStylesofProcrastination.com, you can take a personality quiz. View a chart that describes the thinking, speaking and acting modes of each procrastination style. Read inspirational quotes just for procrastinators. And if you're pleased with your accomplishments but recognize how much easier it would be with a tailwind at your back, explore my coaching services
