This Bold New Year’s Plan Will Change Your Life (It Did Mine)

One of life’s toughest challenges is something that we face repeatedly each day: holding ourselves accountable. Let’s face it — we can have all the talent, a brilliant imagination and the support of others, but if we’re not disciplined enough to focus and hold ourselves to a plan, then all our bold ideas won’t matter. Accountability is paramount, and it begins with you.

Being accountable to ourselves requires sharp focus and self-control. It also requires a benchmark, or standard, that we can refer back to, that helps us track our progress. I begin each year with New Year’s Resolutions, which are aimed at adding bold, new challenges to plan, while also helping me make incremental improvements in areas where I made strides the previous year.

(Please see my upcoming column on New Year’s Resolutions this Monday)

I encourage you to not just make resolutions, but rather, to write the game plan for your life. This plan starts with a measure of accountability — or a charter — that will serve as the compass that enables you to forge the path of your dreams. This is where you define success. It’s where you state your goals and write out the guiding values that shape your human experience.

It will forever change your course in life.

I’m so confident of this because this very strategy enabled me to go from working for leaders of Fortune 500 companies to coaching and consulting for them. It led me to write my first book, The Value of You, and to become an Amazon Bestseller. I now have successful businesswomen and men, as well as aspiring writers reaching out to me to ask me for my secret to success.

I dont mind sharing it because my core mission in life is to help and serve others. I want you to be successful and happy. I want you to live life on your terms, free of the burdens of doing things you don’t really want to do just to make a buck. It’s not easy. Trust me, I’m no salesman of lofty ideas with grandiose promises.

It takes hard work, dedication, repetition, consistency and tremendous belief in yourself. But it begins with holding yourself accountable. Listed below is the plan to help you get there and build your foundation. I hope it brings tremendous values to your life.

Here are the key ingredients:

· An overarching objective

· Definition of Success

· Success Measures (which fortify and serve as milestones for your definition of success

· Goals

· Risks

Values

· Key Deliverables (what you will actually produce — something tangible)

I’ve taken this model and implemented this — with tremendous results — first, in my own life, but also for my coaching clients. I encourage each individual to write a personal charter. Whether you are a writer, small business owner, artist, athlete or student, a well-defined plan will help drive you toward commitment, and increase the probability of achieving your goals.

Dr. Timothy A. Pychyl discusses further:

“In a series of well-designed studies, E.J. Masicampo (Wake Forest University) and Roy Baumeister (Florida State) demonstrated that committing to a specific plan for a goal frees up cognitive resources for our other pursuits. So, in addition to helping us be more successful with the specific goal we’re planning, planning lets us get on with other stuff too. Once a plan is made, we can stop thinking about the one goal and make room for others.” Source: Psychology Today

Objective

Here is my objective:

To live each moment to the fullest by having a positive attitude, a smile and genuine enjoyment for life, while giving everything I have to love the people and environment around me, and achieve my goals and success on my terms.

What is yours? Have you thought about this? Maybe your time to do so is this weekend.

One of the major life goals formy personal charter was to publish my first book. A quick win that I achieved was first the completion of my first draft. Easier said than done! But once I did, I felt an exhilarating sensation, a helpful dose of adrenaline that propelled me forward and inspired me to keep going.

What are the successes that you are most proud of? Chances are, you had some quick wins along the way that made an enormous difference in propelling you forward.

Quick Wins and Risk

I’ve written previously about the power of defining success on your terms. I’m a big believer that having an overall objective, accompanied by smaller, incremental goals, will help orient you toward what you really want.Successful business leaders that I’ve observed always have an objective in mind. They could tell you what it is on a moment’s notice.

Small incremental goals serve as “quick wins” that help us achieve small successes, in an Agile manner. These quick wins sustain us, empowering and fueling us to continue persevering.

Risks are the potential impediments that could derail and impede our progress forward. This does not mean that they will occur. Just that they are possible. We can assess and assign numerical values to their probability. Furthermore, even if they do, a strong mindset and plan geared toward avoiding and mitigating risks will smooth the road to success.

Accountability

Accountability is certainly made easier through friends or colleagues that we trust, but the way to really ensure that you’re doing what you resolved to do, is to hold yourself accountable first. I dedicate time — at least once per day — to reviewing my daily or weekly plan. I also review my personal charter on a weekly basis.

While plans will change, your charter should stay the same, as long as you are in noble pursuit of your goals. Like values, which stand the test of time and remain constant, your charter is there to help you weather the storm of changing emotions. It’s a rock-solid foundation of confidence and direction that you can always check-in with to make sure you’re accomplishing all you hope to do.

If you are the best judge of your own success and character — (you are!) — then you are also intelligent and capable enough to measure yourself against what you planned to do. Accountability and productivity tools like Evernote, OneNote and Outlook are wonderful and they DO help. But all the tools in the world won’t actually get you to commit to action.

Only you can do that. You control your willpower.

Signed, Sealed, Delivered

Take the time to do the work, then begin in earnest to attain the big goals in support of your objective. Define your deliverables. What do you want to actually produce that will help you get to where you really want to be? Write those things down but don’t obsess over them. Obsess over the journey. Relish in getting up each day to achieve your big goals and dreams.

The best part is the journey!

Get inspired! Use each day as a building block to help lay your foundation, so that before long, you’re well on the way to constructing your masterpiece.

Make 2018 Your BEST Year!

The Value of You e-book is available for a limited time for just $2.99! Order the e-book HERE!

Join my newsletter if you’d like, Follow my Facebook Page and join me on your journey. Let’s GO!

Additional Reading

No One Will Ever Care More About Your Success than You

3 Proven Techniques to Recharge Your Focus for the New Year

This Bold New Year’s Plan Will Change Your Life (It Did Mine) was originally published in Personal Growth on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.