Another year has passed. It happened pretty damn quickly too.
Keeping with our theme of accountability…what did you do with your year? Do you feel you made good use of it?
Do you feel healthier? A little happier, in general? Did you take a few more risks than the previous year? Did you make efforts to reduce habits that don’t serve you? Are you a bit closer to your business, relationship and personal goals?
If you reflect on your year, maybe you feel like you wasted time. Maybe your goals still feel out of reach. Maybe you feel like you’ve been pushing a massive boulder up a mountain each day only to get nowhere.
If that’s the case, now is a good time to reflect and create the conditions that will make your success inevitable, as entrepreneur Eben Pagan says. Eben is well-spoken, well-researched and really understands what motivates people. Highly recommended to check out his material, especially for business-minded people.
Another useful resource is Susannah Conway’s free Unravelling the Year Ahead 2016 workbook. It’s loaded with great questions and exercises that help you review how 2015 went for you, and questions designed to help you plan your 2015 goals. It’s a 29-page workbook that ideally you should print out. I completed the 2014 workbook and it’s an enjoyable, creative and helpful process.
Moving Forward No Matter What
If you feel like you didn’t gain much traction this year or if you felt like you were constantly being bombarded with obstacles, it is vital that you continue to stay positive. Creating change and successfully reaching our goals relies heavily on our state of mind. It is definitely a mind game.
Here are a few ideas to keep you ploughing ahead on your goals:
- Be delusionally optimistic. To increase your ability to reach your goals, you will need to be much, much more optimistic than you have been. We’ve all been conditioned by negativity. Complaining and pessimism is the norm. We need to retrain how we view ourselves, other people and our life situations. Experiment with extreme positive thinking. Don’t be “realistic”. Things will work out for you, your health will improve, you will feel a sense of flow and ease.
- Immerse yourself in inspirational resources and learning. Watch online videos and listen to podcasts that motivate you and give you insight into how you can reach your goals faster. Find coaches and mentors who are positive, supportive and care about your success. Read books that help shift your consciousness to a positive frame of mind.
- Connect with your positive support network (friends, family and mentors). Minimize or avoid spending time with negative people. There are many reasons why some people won’t support you and generally, their reasons aren’t valid or helpful. Instead, spend more time with people who are genuinely interested in your success and who are also willing to give you some feedback in a way that motivates you, not crushes your dreams.
Take the time to reflect on your year and make plans to get closer to your goals this year. It’s usually a continuous balancing act between taking action and easing off slightly so that you don’t get burnt out or lose motivation. It’s not a battle and it shouldn’t feel like a struggle, contrary to a lot of the advice we hear about what it takes to reach our goals.
So…go for it! Time will pass for all of us. Might as well spend it doing things we’re excited about and make us feel good.
What’s your plan to reach your goals this year? Leave a comment below or email me personally.
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Photo credit: Angie Torres, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0