What does the New Year have in store
for us?
Nothing!
Really, the New Year is only a
calendar concept; it has nothing to do with how your life is going to turn out
to be; or your business. However, the power to make 2015 is truly in your
hands.
There, I have said it, the standard,
worn out cliché advocated by so many self-help gurus. But then, I am neither a
guru nor a self-help wizard and so I don’t want to bore you with the usual list of do’s and don’ts.
However, all of us want to improve,
grow, achieve, etc., and want everything and every situation to be a win (or
win-win!) going forward.
So consider this as a few basic suggestions
to make 2015 a “breakthrough year”. Here goes.
New
Year Resolution(s)
New Year
resolutions usually tend to be negative, in the sense that they are resolutions
made not to do something. They go something like the simple yet
difficult “I should quit smoking” or “I want to lose a few kilos” to more
complex “I should not …” stuff.
It is
always negative or “not”!
What tends
to happen here is that the negative stays in the mind and consequently there is
little thought on the positives. And it is also very difficult to check your “progress”
because it involves monitoring something that you are not supposed to have done,
like “x days since I last smoked”, etc.
And that’s
why these “New Year Resolutions” quickly lose focus and get forgotten a couple
of months down the line.
What I am
suggesting, instead, is for you to do something positive such as “I will do …”
stuff that will help you set goals of a more positive nature and, therefore,
something that can be monitored and rewarded by you in a progressive way!
Set
Your ONE Goal
This is a
very simple task and it requires a few minutes of attention at most, not hours or
days. Set yourself down in a quiet place at home or work, where no one will
disturb you; turn off your mobile devices, the internet, and every other
electronic item that can likely distract you. All you need is one single piece
of paper and a pen or pencil and you are all set.
Now before
you go crazy writing out all your objectives and intentions and actions, sit
comfortably and do some calm yet serious & open minded thinking to figure
what you want to do. You might reflect on the past years but don’t dwell on
them too much. The trick is to use all that information from the past to
mentally list out the few things that are important going forward. And then
collapse that short list of important items and shape them to the ONE KEY ITEM
that would be your goal.
There will be many mental distractions
and the mental monkey will jump from topic to topic all over the map. But be
resilient, and calmly stay in control. Don’t spend too much time on any item
irrespective of whether you want to list down or disregard that item. Just
think smooth and swiftly zero in on
just the one key thing that you want to do.
Think and
write down the ONE thing that you
want to do.
Not what
you don’t want to do; not how you want to ring in the new year, nor the many positive
actions that you want to undertake; not how you want to do nor who’s help you
are going to take; not what’s it going to cost – No!
Just simply
write down the one thing that you want to do. Your goal.
Thinking about your desires and finalizing
on the one important that you want to do will take, maybe ten minutes. Writing it down will take a few seconds.
You should
be done in under 15 minutes!
Here’s a neat trick – don’t do
anything more at this time. Just let that one single desire, goal, objective or
dream wash over you, fill your senses and seep into your system. Your mind
should be locked on to it and you should be committed to it.
Let just the ONE objective remain with
you for a day or two. Don’t sweat the how, where, and the other stuff yet, you
can do it after a couple of days.
Flesh
Out Your ONE Goal
Now that the one objective is set in
stone (so to say), it is time to figure the details of how, with whose help,
when, etc. This activity could very well take a whole day or two but it will
give you a roadmap / dashboard at the end of the exercise.
Creighton Williams Abrams Jr. was a
United States Army general who commanded military in the Vietnam War. He famously
said, "When eating an elephant take one bite at a time." which
translates to a simple "When you doing something that is difficult, do it
slowly and carefully".
In our context, we break down the big
objective into smaller, manageable and quantifiable objectives that are easy to
monitor, and create milestones and action items against them. And at every
milestone, the questions could be “What
can I do better?” or “What can I do to make things better?”.
Illustration
As an
example and to summarize the above, here are the steps:
1.
Sit down to think calmly and to
internally brainstorm, allowing the mind to flow from the past to the present
and mixing up the thoughts to come up with a list of a few items like “I want
to be implement this great idea”, “I want a job that I enjoy”, “I want to be
the master of my destiny”, “I want to make money”, “I want to have a social
standing” and “I want a balanced personal and professional life”.
2.
These items can easily collapse to “I
want to be an entrepreneur”.
3.
Let that thought settle in for a couple
of days to commit to being an entrepreneur. This is the big objective or dream.
4.
Once the commitment is a hundred
percent, hopefully in the next couple of days, create a plan with the next
moves with quantifiable objectives and a clear time scale.
5.
Define the scope of the objectives and
detail the activities and cover what, how, when, where, with whom / with what
resources, etc. These constitute the strategic processes to adopt to accomplish
the objective.
6.
Then define the milestones and review
schedule with questions to address at those review points. These are hard
questions that will cover “What can I do better?”,
“What can I do to make things better?” and so on. These constitute the
navigational aids to attain the objective.
Resources
Kall Ramanathan
@KallRamanathan
ValueStrat
Consulting @ValueStrat helps businesses
understand where they are currently and what they need to do to get where they
want to go. For this, we provide essential strategic plans and approaches,
called “Keys”, to enable businesses to open up competencies and clear
inefficiencies.
ValueStrat
gets to the DNA of
business - Desire, Need and Ability -
to help you ask some critical questions such as discussed above. Check out http://www.valuestrat.in
for more
