How to turn your new year’s resolutions into a reality in 2020!
Updated: Jan 26, 2022
Yes, we have all done it! We have all, at one point or another, made a new year’s resolution and decided that we were going to accomplish some goal or purpose, while watching the fireworks and thinking about our future. We go to bed feeling excited about the year to come and very hopeful that all our dreams will come true this year.
But a very peculiar thing will happen in the next few weeks to come. We might start putting our plans into action for a few days or a couple of weeks, and we might be very actively working on this plan, at least for a brief while. But slowly and surely these actions start to fade, as our regular activities start to come in and take over the show. Before you know it you have completely forgotten about your goals and you are back into your old routine and simply doing the things that only get you by. You might even start to blame the goals or some other thing like, time, kids, family etc. Eventually you are in a complete apathy about your goals, at least until the next new year’s eve, when you feel confident enough to say to your self again, “let’s try it again this year.”
If you have every had this happen to you then please do read on as I will explain the main reasons to you.
Why did your new year’s resolution fail?
There are a few points to why new year’s resolutions tend to fail and I will cover them broadly here.
1. You didn’t go into immediate action
This is the first and most fatal mistake. New Year’s Day is a Holiday for most people, and who wants to plan his whole year while he is off of work and relaxing, right?
Wrong!!! If you are not living your dreams and achieving your goals, should you really be taking time off to rest and relax? Think about it for a second. If you didn’t do all the things you needed to, to get you what you want throughout the year, should you be taking it easy? Holidays are for closers!!! If you didn’t meet your quota last year then you should be using every bit of time off that you have to figure out what went wrong and to handle it.
What you should be doing, even before New Year’s Eve, is to start planning your year and putting in ACTIONS that will move you closer to your goals. Ask any successful person what they do on their holidays and they will all tell you that they worked at least to some degree while on vacation. In fact most likely the vacation was an excuse to get in more production, like looking for new suppliers or investigating new business ventures etc.
But what do you do first, as the very first action? That brings me to the 2nd mistake.
2. You didn’t create a plan
If you have never travelled somewhere before, do you feel like you could confidently get to that location without a map and a route? The first thing most people would do, would be to get the GPS and mapo the route or call the travel agent and find out about flights.
Most people have goals that they have never before accomplished, so not having a clear path or plan on how to achieve those goals would be like setting off to climb Everest, but not knowing how to even get to the Himalayas.
You have to create plan and a sub set of actions that if all were to be completed, would lead to you accomplishing your goal. There are various technologies for doing this and we recommend a technology called the “Admin Scale”. You can Google it to find out more.
Once you have you plan in place, you know what to do. You know the actions. But even with this there is more that is still required.
3. You didn’t set strict policy to keep you moving towards your goals
Many a man have had a goal and a plan, but still didn’t make it. Why is this? Well if your Goal is something that you never achieved before, do you think that if you just kept doing the same things day in and day out that you would ever achieve something that you have never achieved before? You would be a fool if you said yes to this question.
To get things we have never achieved we need to change our actions. And since most worthwhile goals take time and persistence to achieve we need to change our actions for a long period of time, in order to stand a chance of hitting our goals.
So the last thing you had to do to make your dreams a reality is to get real with yourself and put you own ethics in! You have to look at what you were doing before that wasn’t getting you closer to your dreams. We all have these things like, drinking, goofing off, social media, spending too much time on our hobbies, TV etc. I’m not saying you need to stop doing all things fun, but you have to look at how these things are affecting your productivity, and then you need to implement policies to manage these things.
Policies are just your own rules for yourself or your family or business. These rules are created because you know that they are PRO-SURVIVAL for you. They get you closer to your goal.
Some examples of policies that you can put in place, right off the bat:
review my plan for ______ every Friday at 15:00 and make sure that I am on track
don’t go on social media during the week, save it for weekends
only watch 1 hour TV every night
go to bed by 9pm every night
set aside R2000.00 every month for ______ and deposit it into an account that I cannot touch
stop watching the news
These are just some simple ones that I thought of that could apply to most people, but you will know what your own do’s and don’ts are so you can create any policy that steers you in the right direction.
4. You didn’t have team mates
One man is only as powerful as his team behind him. A team can be as small as 2 people. Trying to accomplish things totally on your own out in the world will get tough really quickly. You need some backing. You will need someone to keep you on track. You will need someone to bounce your ideas off of. You need power in numbers.
This can be as simple as getting your marital partner on board and even your kids. The more people around you, you can align to your goals and purposes, the more successful you will be. That doesn’t mean that you should recruit everyone in sight, but it means that you should get them to see the good in what you are trying to achieve and how this would benefit them too. That way they won’t try to stop you, but they will rally behind you.
5. Get rid of bad apples
We all have people or know of people in our environment that are no good for us. Sometimes they are not easy to spot though, but we all have them. They are the ones that are covertly stopping us from achieving our goals. Many times this could be your partner. These people, whoever they are are not on your side. They wish nothing but your demise, even if they would never admit this publicly. These are the people who criticize you ever so slightly. Who tempt you to do things that are off track. Who talk behind your back about you. Or they are simply just negative in some way.
You made a decision to reach your goals. Those goals should be driving you and are usually the only real reason for living itself. Do you want to risk not achieving them, simply because you feel you should be nice to all people?
This is the toughest one of all I mentioned above, but without getting rid of bad(for you) people in your life, you will never accomplish your goals. You should be making friends with people who have achieved what you want. You should be learning from them. You definitely need to stay away from anyone that has not accomplished anything, and yet is trying to give you advise on how to live your life.
We hope this article helps you reach your goals in 2020 and that you can take something from this to apply. Webfanatix wishes you all the best for the new year and we know it will be a prosperous year now because you will use and apply the above!