Ready for the New Year?

What do you do to get ready for the New year?  Do you set resolutions?  Create goals?  Pick a word or a feeling you want to embody for the year?  I’ve done all of these and more each year and I’ve found some years to be more successful than others.

Throughout my years of experimentation, I have found two things that have been crucial to a successful year – regardless of how I plan for the year.  Ready for the secrets?

1. Tie whatever you plan to do to your values.  A few years ago I went into depth on this topic, but the gist of it is to make sure your goals align with your values.  If they don’t, you will be hard-pressed to follow through because you’ll always be feeling uneasy about your plans for the year.
2. If you aren’t excited about it, you won’t succeed. No matter how detailed or specific your goals or resolutions are if you aren’t really jazzed about them, it’s going to be very hard to actually take the action steps needed to succeed.  So don’t bother creating goals you feel like you “should” do, create ones you can’t wait to get started on.  Even if they don’t make a lot of sense right now, excitement and the energy that goes along with it will take you a lot farther than a detailed plan of ho-hum steps.

I’ve decided this year to go back to the basics and come up with a list of 3 or 4 BIG goals for each area of importance in my life.  Then I plan on focusing on just ONE of those goals for each area every three months.  Really spend a lot of time on a few specific areas instead of trying to manage a dozen projects and plans at a time.

I’ll be working on refining them in the next few weeks and will tackle an area or two each week on the blog as I suspect many of my goals are similar to yours.

What are your goals and plans for 2017?  Anything specific or exciting?  Share in the comments or on the Facebook page – I’d love to get to know what dreams you are chasing this year – if they resonate with a lot of my readers and clients I’ll try to spend a little time digging deeper this year and helping you out with tips and tricks for success!