It’s late January. Not even a full month into the new year and chances are you no longer have to fight for a spot in the gym parking lot. You may be wondering, why is it that year after year we put time, energy, and money into making personal resolutions only to have them rarely fulfilled?
As experts in bringing about personal and professional transformation, Arden’s coaches know that setting and sticking to a behavioral change not only takes a great deal of willpower but a commitment on a deep personal level.
Want to learn to better carry through with your workplace resolutions? Check out the following article brought to you by Arden Coaching.
Step 1: Envision Your Future with Your Goal Met
The first step in making a workplace resolution a reality is to take some time to think about why you’ve chosen this goal in particular. What will you get out of this change?
Say your resolution is to increase your emotional intelligence. See the future you with better emotional intelligence: You communicate better with your teams and make decisions that you and others are happier with. You may even have more patience at home and connect better with your friends and family.
For a lot of people, a crucial part of the resolution-writing process is to actually write it down. Writing your hopes for personal improvement will help you to create a positive direction for yourself and make it easier to remember why you’re making these changes.
Step 2: Create a Step-by-Step Plan for Attainment
Revising daily habits is extremely challenging. If you set a personal goal to lose weight without a structure in place for how you’ll slim down (often a diet and exercise plan), it’s going to be hard to get anywhere close.
One important point here is to make sure that you aren’t biting off more than you can chew. In the grand scheme of your goal, how much weight do you want to lose? How will you tackle working toward this goal on a monthly, weekly, and daily basis?
If your resolution is to end meetings on time, set up a series of reminders for yourself, with more in place than you think you need. This could be an alert that goes off on your phone at 20 minutes till end time, 15 minutes, 10 minutes, etc. As you get better, you’ll be able to gradually take these reminders away.
Step 3: Up Your Personal Accountability
A helpful method to reinforce your resolution is to let other people know about your goal. By doing this, you in turn feel more responsible for carrying through. It also helps if you can team up with another person to increase the accountability of your actions.
Say your resolution is to conduct more regular performance reviews with your team instead of leaving them to the last three weeks of the fourth quarter. Ask another exec to be you accountability partner, and before each monthly staff meeting you have together, vow that you’re going to check in with each other on performance review progress. You’ll now anticipate that your partner’s going to ask, “Have you talked to all of your people?”
Step 4: Plan for How to Bounce Back
One thing that resolution writers rarely plan for is what they’ll do when they start to veer back onto the path of their old habits. This is where most people get lost. The key to sticking with it is to come up with a plan or ways to reboot your commitment when you start to lose steam. Will you tell your accountability partner? Promise to keep pushing forward? Be sure to put these in writing too.
Executive coaches are the ultimate accountability partners. If you’re an executive looking to shift your behaviors for the better, a coach can bring an extra motivational boost to attaining your professional goals. Find more about our process or get in touch with one of our esteemed coaches today.
