Very much like 90% of the population, I have made a New Year resolution. This time, I actually went all the way…
I recently read Your best year ever from Jenny Ditzler. I went through the book and then sat down to work the plan. Rather than do it in the recommended three hours session, I worked on it over a few days. I do suffer from the “I should have said this syndrome”. i.e. my mouth does a lot more thinking than my brain. For those of you who don’t know what this is, I very often go over previous conversations and start working out what I should have said rather than what I actually said. I am very impulsive, this has given me a lot of troubles over the years, some of those I am still living now…. Sorry I digress.To come back to the book and the resolutions. It did take me over three hours to formulate my plan for 2010 and put it in writing.
The book makes you look on the past year to write down your achievements and your disappointments for the previous year. Interestingly, the disappointments were very much in my mind but the achievements took a little longer. Once I had written my achievements, I started to feel a lot better about last year. I did achieve quite a lot in fact and am quite proud of where my new company got to.
Chapter three, Lessons learned, made me realise how much my personal life, my health and fitness suffered from my total focus on the new venture. You then have to make guidelines for next year from your learning.
Chapter four is all about the voice in your head tha stop you from achieving great things. For me, this voice keeps reminding me of past business failures and lack of luck. Lack of luck? I am not sure where this last one comes from as I feel quite lucky when I think about it. I also believe that the harder you work the luckier you get. The last part of this chapter makes you write new paradigms to empower yourself. The idea is to make sure it is positive, personal, in present tense, powerfully stated and pointing to an exciting new possibility.
Jinny believes that to make your goals real and to be able to stick them they need to be in line with your values. Therefore chapter five makes you list your values.
The next two chapter make your work out which roles you are playing in your life i.e. father, husband, brother, entrepreneur, etc… and which one you want to focus on.
Once this is done you have to make a list of ten goals for each roles . I believe that Ten is a lot so you really need to start consolidating roles. I personally consolidated to three roles: family, entrepreneur and mind & body. From those goals, you have to choose ten goals that will be your Top Ten Goals.
The year plan is then done by writing on one page:
- The lessons you learned from last year
- The new paradigm
- Your major focus
- Your top ten goals
This was a long trek but now you have it in front of you. How are you going to achieve those? How are you going to make sure that the three hours spent on this are not wasted and the plan stuffed in a drawer and never looked at again? Jinny suggests to set monthly goals, set weekly goals to progress the monthly goals and to focus on roles and personal values rather than tasks.
2010 here we go!
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