Future-Focused Thinking (Curt Swenson and Wendy Samson, 2015)
Next Friday night, many of us will celebrate by watching the ball drop in Times Square. We’ll toast our friends and family, sing, give some hugs and ring in the new year with renewed optimism and energy. We may even set some new goals for ourselves in the form of resolutions. Maybe it’s quitting a bad habit, getting healthier, spending more time with family or saving more money. Regardless of your resolution, we all have goals for the next year.
While we all have the best of intentions with our new year’s resolutions, by mid February we often revert back to our old behaviors. The gym visits become more rare, we spend more time at work or, we start buying those expensive coffees again! So, I’d like to share just a couple tips around goals this year that just might help make your resolutions stick. And by the way, these tips work when your planning your business goals as well.
Write down your goals with exquisite clarity. Remember, if it’s not written down, it doesn’t have to exist the way you want it to. When you think about what you really want and write down what that looks like, you’ll move beyond trying to change behavior and start changing the way you think. So, get your goals on paper, look at them often and set some time aside to review them every week.
Think outcomes! When setting your goals, go beyond the simple actions you want to take and clearly articulate the outcomes of those activities. For example, if you want to exercise more this year, it’s fine to set a goal to get to the gym three times a week. However, you will be much more successful if you think about WHY you want to go to the gym. Are you trying to lose weight? Are you training for an event? Do you want to lower your blood pressure? Maybe you just want to be more confident with yourself. Whatever the outcome of your goal, think about the WHY and write that down too.
Finally, set goals around the most important things. Often, we get too ambitious and want to set our resolutions or goals around every aspect of our lives or our businesses. This year, try focusing on three of the most important things for you. When we focus on just a few of the most important goals, it’s much easier to keep them on the top of mind and see opportunities to achieve them. If you want to learn more about how to set effective goals for yourself or your company, contact FutureSYNC’s consultants at (406) 254-2326.
From all of us at FutureSYNC International to all of you, we would like to wish you the merriest of holidays and the most wonderful of years in 2016!