Keep your New Year’s resolutions positive, specific

Among the helpful, little applications that you are playing with you find a BMI calculator that promises, with a little aid from your bathroom scale, to work out your body mass index (i.e. how fat you are relative to your height).
After stepping onto the said scale, and re-adjusting your belt so you can actually see the numbers past your stomach, you hit a few buttons and the app, in a pretty-large red text, throws up “31! You are obese!”
Just as well you left the audio option off or it would have boomed “Fatty” across the room. It must have been the extra ham on Boxing Day you think, but at the back of your mind you cannot shake the thought that your belt has not really fitted as well over the last three months.
No problem though, New Year’s Eve is just around the corner; you can make a resolution to lose weight!
With that happy thought you reach for another Christmas mince pie (after all it is not New Year yet is it?)
Around 80 percent of New Year’s resolutions fail! That means a staggering four out of five people who decide to embark on a new trend never get there. While New Year is the most common goal setting time of year, we set them throughout our lives and if 80 percent of them fail then that is an awful lot of wasted goal setting.
One of the prime reasons for the failure of New Year’s resolutions is that generally they are set in the negative. Quick experiment; for one minute I don’t want you to think about a pink elephant, keep all thoughts of a pink pachyderm out of your mind. What are you thinking about? Chances are it’s a pink elephant. Annoying, isn’t it? The only way not to think of it is to think of something else entirely, like a blue raccoon. What has this to do with goal setting?
Well, if your goal is to say “quit smoking” your internal conversation goes something like “I’m gonna quit smoking . . . quit smoking . . . smoking . . . smoking . . . ah smoking where is my box of cigarettes.”
Negative goals just do not cut it, they just reinforce the current situation.
The other reason is a lack of specifics. What is to lose some weight? What is “some”? I mean, a hundred grammes is “some” but you are not exactly going to drop a dress size. You want your business to be profitable. That is commendable, but one-dollar profit is still profitable to your mind. How much profit?
Now what would that look like at the end of 2012? What do you have to change in your production and operations to make that extra cash? See the difference. Here are some pointers to help set effective resolutions or goals for you and your business.
Keep it positive
Set goals in the positive. Take your problem and flip it to see what the opposite of the problem would be. What would life look like if the problem was not there. If you quit smoking then you will “be healthier”. Overweight? Well, what is your ideal weight?
Be specific
Get down to the nitty-gritty. How much money do you want? How many units are you aiming to sell this year? How many new clients are you planning on attracting to your company? Be real with yourself; shedding 25kg in weight means dropping 2 kilos a month. Can you see yourself doing this”? Check out diet options that may help you achieve this. Doubling your client base is a noble aspiration, but also look at the ramifications to your business -will you need more staff, more equipment, better people skills? Do not cut back on the goal just because it looks difficult, just appreciate what it may take to achieve it and look at it as an exciting adventure to a great reward.
What can you do today?
It’s all well and good having a set of goals that reach to year end but what are the immediate, small steps you can implement in the next two weeks? If you are planning a holiday then write down four or five things that you can start doing – googling destinations, calling a travel agent to get them to search for specials for you, starting a holiday fund, booking your leave now. Small steps that add to the bigger goal later. Looking to increase sales at the company then what can you do today to produce a long-term rise in income?
Perhaps you need to do a SWOT analysis of your business, call a strategy meeting, devote an hour of your week to sales training, investigate advertising options, examine successful regular clients to see why they take your product, go on a course. There is so much that can be done. Do not try to do it all yet.
Plan, think, and then look at the next few easily changeable steps, mini-goals if you will, that will begin to take you from where you are to where you want to be. You do not have to plan every step between the now and your final destination, just the next few – there are too many variables that you may not see right now and that may only reveal themselves after you have moved forward.
Then when you have successfully completed the first couple look at the next steps in bite-sized chunks, these first few changes should create a positive buzz that motivates you to keep moving to the major goal.
Finally, remember that the clearer you can see your goal in your mind’s eye, to the degree that you can make out the details, that is the degree to which you will be successful in achieving it.
Have a prosperous, successful and fun-filled 2012.