Did you make resolutions for the new year for your business? How is that going? If you are like many people, you are already having challenges.
When you think about it, New Year’s resolutions are an uphill batter. Just because the calendar shows a new year does not mean we are different people. The average person cannot change overnight.
That doesn’t mean New Year’s resolutions are bound to fail. But it may help to change your definition of “success” and “failure.” Here are three tips for making sure those New Year’s resolutions actually succeed in improving your business – and maybe changing your life.
- Look at resolutions as gradual rather than sudden changes.
You did things the way you did last year for a reason – you have limitations in time, money and everything else. And you are who you are; your situation is what it is. None of those things will cahnge easily.
Think of your life as a big ocean liner that turns slowly rather than a speedboat that you can turn on a dime. Keep turning that wheel and eventually you will change the way you do things.
Which brings us to…
- Don’t give up if you have setbacks.
You may already have “failed” at one of your resolutions. Was one of your resolutions, for example, to wake up early every Saturday morning and work on your business – and you’ve already slept in a couple of Saturdays?
It would be easy to abandon that resolution, thinking that you’ve already blown it. How about thinking of the resolution as a work in progress – something you can get better at every month. If you think of it that way and you keep trying, you will find that you are making progress as the year goes on.
And that leads to…
- Keep putting one foot in front of the other.
Those tales of survival against all odds tend to have a common theme – the person or persons whose lives in danger never gave up and kept on moving toward a place where they could be rescued, even if it meant crawling only 100 feet a day. If you just keep moving forward, your progress is bound to give you encouragement – and that will motivate you to move faster. Pretty soon, you’ll be farther along than you ever thought possible.
One final thought – as the year progresses, you may look ahead and see that fulfilling all of your resolutions is impossible. Don’t focus on what you failed to achieve; focus on what you did achieve – if you’re ahead of where you started, it was a successful year.
Photo by Isaac Smith on Unsplash
