There must be some reason why certain people can make their New Year’s resolutions last and create new habits while most people give up on theirs within a day or two…
You see, there’s one little thing you can do this year to make sure that you follow through with your New Year’s resolutions even if you’ve never followed through with any of your resolutions before.
Ready?
Here’s what you need to do. You need to create a plan to stick to your New Year’s resolutions. And here’s why:
Some of you know that Tony Robbins has had a great influence on me and one of the things he always says is Never leave the site of setting a goal without making a plan. Look, when you don’t make a plan for yourself you do not have any obligation to follow through on your goals or resolutions.
It’s the plan that gives you the motivation (or at least tells you what to do) when all the motivation from reading a book or listening to a speaker is gone.
But the main reason I like to make a plan as soon as I have a new goal is this: I don’t have to think about it! I don’t have to worry about forgetting it or not working on it…It’s all in the plan and in my schedule so it starts to become something like second nature and that’s exactly where you want to be with your resolutions…don’t you?
And we’ll talk about going from a plan into step-by-step actions that you can take later, but for now let’s plan things out.
1. The first thing I want you to do is visualize (or think about) what your goal would look like or what you’d look like as a result of your New Year’s resolutions in a year. Think about all the specifics.
If one of your goals is to lose weight then ask yourself how much weight you wanted to lose? The goal is to setup a new business, do you think what is that business going to look like in a year? If your goal is to get new clients, how many of them would you like?
2. Now you need to start thinking of where you are right now. Think about how you’re currently doing with your resolutions and write it down.
3. List all of your assets that are going to help you get to where you want. Think about key contacts, money, past experiences, or anything that could help you.
4. The next step is to figure out exactly what you need to do to get to where you have visualized yourself on Dec 31, 2010.
Listen, we all have some sort of general ideas about what we need to do to achieve our goals and all I’m asking you to do is to jot them down on paper for now. And, if you feel like there’s a gap that you’re not sure about, just ask your contacts (who have had success in doing what they want to do) or refer to a book/magazine/trusted article that can help you a little.
Take a couple of days to complete this exercise and I’ll show you how to take your rough plan and turn it into a step-by-step action plan for easy and stress-free way to stick to your New Year’s resolution.
