What do you do in the New Year?

Are you someone who makes New Years Resolutions? I used to make New Year’s Resolutions, but like most people, after the first couple of weeks of January, I had to peek inside of the little notebook where I wrote my resolutions down to remember what they were. It became a process that disappointed me before it got started.

I’ve always been a highly motivated and extremely driven person. I wanted to do more than make a resolution and forget about it. I wanted to aim for something and succeed, but how? I worked as a project manager and became accustomed to writing project plans, or action plans. They worked relatively well for pulling off a huge project, so why not try it for my life?

As it turns out, this was a brilliant idea! I wrote an action plan for having a better marriage, about financial goals I had and then another one about some personal goals I had. It was a way to keep myself focused, on task and led to me achieving most things I had planned. Over the years, this has morphed into my life plan. Not only does it keep me focused but it helps me hold myself accountable.

Each year, I spend quite a bit of time creating and editing my life plan. During the planning process, I go through times where I think I am Superwoman and I end up trying to accomplish far more than I know I am capable of. Then I go through times where I downplay what I know that I can achieve because…you guessed it, I do not have the time!

I have an incredible mentor, Mark Cole, who is the CEO of all of John Maxwell’s companies who has also taught me to use my life plan to go back, reflect, evaluate and learn lessons from the previous year. He also challenged me to have my husband evaluate my progress over the past year. This revealed some great insight as to where he thinks I excelled and where he thinks I need to work harder.

So again, are you looking to succeed? Are you being intentional about defining where it is that you are going and what it is that you are trying to accomplish? Maybe the real question is, how invested are you in your own success?

This is something I am working on with several of my coaching clients right now. Are YOU ready to take 2018 to another level?