The year of keeping your agreements

This is THE year. The year that everything changes. The year that is so epic that you’ll be talking about how everything changed for me in 2024.

or will it be just like last year…

As far as New Year’s resolutions go, some research shows that up to 50% of people will fail to make any more progress towards what they said they wanted by the end of January. That’s pretty depressing.

One of the primary drivers of this high percentage of failures is that the goals people set for themselves are a little too lofty. I’m all for the old saying of “shoot for the moon and if you miss you’ll be among the stars,” but when we haven’t been shooting much and get ourselves wrapped up in the New Year planning, our excitement can make us a little delusional.

However, there’s always those outliers that actually do those big things in life that they said they were going to do at the start of a new year and that can make the rest of us feel like complete losers.

In fact, we are worse off than we started. We let ourselves down and if we shared what we had decided to do, we let others down. It makes us feel helpless, less than, incapable or inadequate of ever “making it” in life. It can make us question our profession and all our decisions we made up to this point AND…I am guilty.

More times than I can count did I declare that I will earn 30% net profit, lose 15 pounds of fat and gain 10 pounds of muscle, hire 4 more people and take multiple vacations! I have written goals of income that would be a 500% increase from what I was currently making. I did the same for my business revenue.

When you look at any viable business, most owners should be completely thrilled any year where they experienced double digit growth. That means that we should be happy with going from one million to 1.1 million, right? But that’s not exciting or sexy. We want to see 100% minimum most of the time! At least that’s how I have always felt about it.

And look, there are people who are doing exactly this in their business. They go from 2 million to 4 then from 4 to 8 and that is absolutely incredible! I love it!

The problem is, if we don’t experience the same growth as these other people experience we feel like we aren’t doing something right or they know some secret we don’t know about or they are much smarter than us. I’m not saying that any of these thoughts aren’t true. Maybe some of them are…

Or maybe we set our goals a little too high…

To avoid beating yourself up over failed goals or comparing yourself to others why not set a couple other goals?

You can set 3 goals for every outcome you’d like to achieve. If it’s losing 30 pounds then what is the minimum amount of weight lost that would be a good first step in the right direction? 5 lbs? 10 lbs?

Shoot for that first. Do whatever you need to do to make it happen. DO NOT LET YOURSELF DOWN ON THIS ONE! No excuses, do it.

Next set your target goal. Maybe that’s 20 lbs. You are going to do the work to make that happen and if you need to lose 30 then you know 20 is completely doable, right? You got this!

Next set your “crushed it” goal at your 30 lbs that you really wanted in the first place. Now you are taking steps that give you some momentum on your way to hitting your ultimate goal.

If you set lofty dreamy goals, I love you. You and I are the same. I also want you to get as close as humanly possible to hitting your big goals or even surpassing them. Just allow the idea of the possibility that hitting your “minimum” goal is what can give you the momentum to keep you going instead of quitting like most people.

And remember…if you don’t give up you will accomplish all of those big goals you have set for yourself. Happy New Year and get to work! You owe it to yourself, your team and your family to make your dreams come true!