Goal setting for the new year.

Welcome to a New Year! I hope the festive period treated you all well and you’re ready to go in 2020.

With the start of the New Year there is a natural opportunity to take stock, reset and refocus for the New Year, but how many of us actually take advantage of this?

Now the first thing I want to avoid is the clichéd ‘new year’s resolutions’. New Year’s resolutions generally don’t work, in fact the estimate is that less than 10% of New Year's resolutions are actually achieved (University of Scranton Psychology Professor John C. Norcross, Ph.D.).

This is usually down to resolutions being too large in scope and scale to be realistically achievable.

Each year I take that time to chose a word that I want to serve as my underlying principle for the coming year. Last year the word was finish. This year it’s build. The key here is finding a word that gets to the very heart of what you want to achieve for the year. In order to really have success with this you need to invest time in working through different words and feeling what works, until you find a single word that you feel is “right”.

From this starting point you can then underpin all your decisions and focus all your actions on remaining consistent with your principle for the year. For me building is about growing our business, building more relationships through networking and building our client portfolio. But as with building a new house or an office block it’s important for me to get the foundations right first, otherwise the rest of the building work won’t be properly supported.

This helps to provide me with clarity of decision making and short term goal setting which is the key to achieving long term sustainable results.

So what’s your word for 2020? I hope you find this insight helpful and I wish you luck in achieving your goals for 2020.