I’ve recently asked lots of people whether they’ve made any New Year’s resolutions and, to my surprise, the majority have said no. The conversation tends to go like this:

Me: Why not?

Them: Because I have given up making them

Me: Why?

Them: Because I never stick to them

Me: Why? (my vocabulary is limited)

Them: Because I always make them too difficult; Because I make too many; Because I’m not motivated to carry them out; Because I forget; Because I get distracted and focus on other things; Because there’s nobody pushing me to do them; Because I lost sight of the point; Because I chose them at random and they don’t actually fit in my life;…and so on - you get the picture.

New Year’s resolutions and goals and objectives at work are exactly the same thing applied to different parts of our lives, and they succeed or fail for exactly the same reasons.

To make sure we achieve our objectives - at home or at work - we need to follow some simple rules:

1. Find one or two things that will make a major difference, and focus on those
• We all have lots of things in our lives that we would like to change, but Rome wasn’t built in a day. You are far more likely to succeed by changing one thing at a time than you are if you try to change everything at once.
2. Write them down
• Studies have shown that writing down your goals increases your chances of achieving them, and of course if you have them written where you can see them all the time you are more likely to remain committed to them and keep striving to achieve them.
3. Break them into bite-sized pieces
• In corporate language today we often hear the phrase ‘let’s not try to eat the elephant’. Ignoring the disturbing question of why we would consider trying to eat an elephant, we understand the point. If you are aiming to run a marathon you will probably aim for a 10km run and then a half-marathon before you go for the full monty.
4. Track your progress
• Measure your progress at regular intervals, and keep a record somewhere - make a chart, keep a personal log, draw up a scoreboard or mark it in your diary - whatever works for you, but make sure you know how you’re doing. We often avoid tracking because we don’t want to see that we haven’t made progress, but it is often this that will motivate us to work harder!
5. Reward yourself
• Identify some rewards that you will give yourself to celebrate achieving certain milestones. This will motivate you to keep going and allow you some guilt-free treats along the way!
6. If at first you don’t succeed…
• …try, try again. Examine where you’re going wrong, make sure it’s still something worth doing and get help if you need it, but don’t give up. Stay focused and believe that you can do it and you are certain to achieve.