Last week, we said that we are to filter every New Year
Resolution (NYR) through three main questions. (Read about it here). That
should have narrowed your NYRs to just a few that are worth doing and with just
a few days to the new year and here are the five MUSTS to live up to them.
Be accountable – A lack of accountability is perhaps the main reason we have a 92% NYR failure rate. You have to be willing to be accountable to your family and friends who are willing to hold you accountable. Let them know why you made the resolution and how they can help you keep it. Most importantly let them know what they should do if they see you not living up to it. When it comes to my diet, I have made this fun for my kids and accountability friends. They all know there’s $10 coming their way anytime they see me eating red meat. I have had to pay a price and sometimes gladly paid it based upon the occasion but overall my intake of red meat is down to single digits per year. By making it fun and motivating my accountability partners, I managed to change a daily habit into a very rare occasion.
Plan to deal with failure – I intend to deal with this more in a future post but think through what happens when you start falling off the track. Please note that I used the word “when” and not “if” on purpose because it’s naïve to think you’ll be amongst the 8% without a struggle. Falling off is also not failing and this brings us to the third reason why most people fail. They stop altogether when they hit a momentary lapse. There are different reasons why lapses happen but the more you think through this, the more you can set in place preventative measures to make it difficult to stop. Knowing that I’d probably struggle reading two non-fiction books a month this year, I teamed up with a friend. We made it easier by making one of the books an optional audiobook (since I spend plenty of time travelling audiobooks worked great). We both committed to buy the other a book of their choice for each month we didn’t meet that goal. We made it easy to track by using amazon kindles to read and also find out where the other person was on their book read. Even with that in place, I still missed a month but overall I’m calling that a successful year for reading books. Again if you determine it’s worth doing then you’ll set in place the measures that will prevent you from failing .
Be accountable – A lack of accountability is perhaps the main reason we have a 92% NYR failure rate. You have to be willing to be accountable to your family and friends who are willing to hold you accountable. Let them know why you made the resolution and how they can help you keep it. Most importantly let them know what they should do if they see you not living up to it. When it comes to my diet, I have made this fun for my kids and accountability friends. They all know there’s $10 coming their way anytime they see me eating red meat. I have had to pay a price and sometimes gladly paid it based upon the occasion but overall my intake of red meat is down to single digits per year. By making it fun and motivating my accountability partners, I managed to change a daily habit into a very rare occasion.
Team up –
When my wife made the decision to lose weight at the beginning of this year she
got in touch with her high school friend who had the same goal. Together they challenged
each other by working out, changing diets and keeping track of their weight
goals. I can tell you there were days when I know that my wife alone would have
given up but her friend wouldn’t allow it and vice versa. Throughout the year I
have seen them get frustrated, bewildered, in pain, momentarily fail but by
teaming up they were able to be stay in it and lose a combined 75lbs in one
year. For two friends who live 2 hours from each other this is quite an
accomplishment. They also became accountable by announcing their intentions on Facebook,
provided status updates and opened YouTube channels to document their weight
lose.
Pay up
and make it hurt to stop – It should cost you at the very least, time and
money. Pay it up early and often. When I made the resolution to run a marathon
last year, I signed up and paid all registration fees. I then teamed up with a
local charity and cleared my morning weekend commitments for training. There
were days I would have like to do be doing other things on Saturday morning but
the thought of stopping and the number of people I’d have to let down kept me
going. If you’ve determined that it’s worth doing, then do it all the way and
start by fully paying for it to where it’s much more painful to stop than to
continue doing it.
Start earlier – I call December my test
run month where I try out different things that I’ll be implementing in the new
year. This helps me know which items I’ll probably live up to, which ones I’ll
struggle with and which ones I will not succeed in. Most importantly it helps
me control the crazy holiday period where it is very easy to indulge going into
the New Year. I’m always reminding of the proverb “Indulgence breeds regret”
Plan to deal with failure – I intend to deal with this more in a future post but think through what happens when you start falling off the track. Please note that I used the word “when” and not “if” on purpose because it’s naïve to think you’ll be amongst the 8% without a struggle. Falling off is also not failing and this brings us to the third reason why most people fail. They stop altogether when they hit a momentary lapse. There are different reasons why lapses happen but the more you think through this, the more you can set in place preventative measures to make it difficult to stop. Knowing that I’d probably struggle reading two non-fiction books a month this year, I teamed up with a friend. We made it easier by making one of the books an optional audiobook (since I spend plenty of time travelling audiobooks worked great). We both committed to buy the other a book of their choice for each month we didn’t meet that goal. We made it easy to track by using amazon kindles to read and also find out where the other person was on their book read. Even with that in place, I still missed a month but overall I’m calling that a successful year for reading books. Again if you determine it’s worth doing then you’ll set in place the measures that will prevent you from failing .
So what have you tried that worked that we can all
learn from?
I’d love to hear from you. To learn more about what we
do and how we can help, please visit us at http://lantelsystems.com or email me at benard@lantelsystems.com
We provide affordable and secure cloud computing
solutions to many entrepreneurs, businesses in different industries and
government agencies.
Our data centers are independently audited not just for
availability but for security and most of all we have the references and the
clients to prove it.
Thanks, Bernard Wambugu
