Top Tips for setting and keeping your New Year resolutions

After another challenging year, Dario Bucceri MBA, an experienced business coach and founder of Manna Consulting and the Sensemaker® Thirty Day Sprint Challenge has offered the following top tips for setting new year resolutions and most importantly, keeping them.

Learn from others: There are many books written with the sole purpose of helping others to achieve their goals so add one to your Christmas list. I give all my clients a copy of The One Thing, by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan. It’s fun and easy to read and it will help you to rethink your approach to knowing what your goal should be and the steps you can take to achieve it.

Think long term: Life takes time. Progress can be slow as we identify blockers, clarify causes, learn our lessons, and apply our learnings. It’s better to set a more extended timeframe and be surprised at better-than-expected results than to aim for a quick win and be disappointed.

Find a tribe: We succeed because of people, not despite of them. If we associate with individuals who live ethically, relate honourably, think positively, take responsibility, plan specifically, execute consistently, and work efficiently, the chances are good that we will raise our game to become like them.

Act: Acting on what you say is critical. Action brings life to words, giving power to your decisions and making them significant. Actions fuel learning as we live in a state of trial, error, and adjustment, patiently building “platforms of understanding” that, in time, will lead to the outcome we seek.

Deconstruct: Activate the positive power of what you feel is blocking your success by instead identifying these blockers as signposts to breakthroughs. By deconstructing the challenge to micro problems, that have combined to form the whole, overcoming them is immediately more achievable.

Meditate over your goals and how you will achieve them

You can increase the probability of achieving a goal simply by having one. You can increase the probability further by writing it down and further still by thinking about it.

I ask all my clients to write a daily journal, recording the outcomes and events that they are grateful for and reminding themselves of their goals and the tasks they have committed to complete in order to get there.

By writing down your goals and meditating on them daily you make them important and increase the chances of them coming to pass.

And finally, remember that achieving goals is not meant to be easy and that’s what makes succeeding even more satisfying.