Setting goals is a great discipline to introduce to your life. The New Year is as good a time as any, although "new year’s resolutions" rarely seem to be successful. In this post, Susie shares her experience and recipe for success…

Set a New Year’s resolution you will keep: Seven Steps to Success:

My last New Year’s resolution lasted 6 days. I woke up on January 1st thinking “don’t eat chocolate, don’t eat chocolate, don’t eat chocolate” and ‘hey-presto’ on January 6th, after six days of craving only chocolate, I was sat at a friend’s birthday party guzzling down a huge slice of chocolate cake. With another New Year approaching I have decided (in true Inner Flame style) to use what I’ve learnt in 2009 to break my pattern of New Year resolution ‘setting then failing’. It is time for a new strategy. So, as you are now grabbing a pen and paper think and commit to setting a New Year’s resolution as well, right now. I would love to share my Seven Steps to New Year Resolution Success with you:    

1) What you focus on is what you get- dream big! Isn’t it so true that people focus so much on what they don’t want that they don’t have clarity on what they DO want?! So, what do YOU really want? This year I am declaring my dreams as my goals by asking myself, “If I could achieve anything in 2010, what would it be?” I am ensuring that these dreams are stated in the positive. Instead of telling myself “Don’t eat chocolate,” going forward I am redirecting my energy and my focus towards what I DO want, e.g. “eat more greens, eat more healthily”.

3) When? It is all too common to set a dream and never know when you have achieved it! My “don’t eat chocolate” resolution had no time-frame. I could have not eaten chocolate for 12 months and never acknowledged whether I had really achieved my goal. So this year I am asking myself some better questions. Try these. How will you know when you have achieved your dream? What is success to you? Get specific…How does it look, hear, and feel?

4) How? So, I now have a new resolution, a dream, stated in the positive, with a strong specific purpose and a specific success criteria. This is where I want to be. However, this knowledge doesn’t equate to power. Only action equates to power. I love the quote “Nothing ever just happens, there is a strategy for everything” (Steve Linder, 2009) So, how do we go about achieving this dream? Firstly it is important to know how you got to where you are currently- your point A. By asking yourself “how am I here?” you can identify the strategies which are not working for you, and ensure you do not repeat these again and again in 2010. Let’s break these patterns now by finding you new, more empowering strategies to achieve your dreams. So, as you are now grabbing your pen again…. think…. if you did know how to get to your B, how would you do it? Quick, go, now, make a plan from A to B!

5) How? How? How? So, you have got your plan, bet you are wondering now “why has she written ‘How’ in the title yet again?” Well, if you only have one way to get to your goal you will get stressed! If people set one plan and it doesn’t work out they get stuck and stop! To prevent this happening we need many plans to get to where we want to be. So add to the bottom of your list a different strategy without replicating the old path, and do it again, and again and again! The more plans you have, the more strategies you have to achieve your dreams. When asking HOW? You could introduce modeling. Modeling is when you find someone who has already achieved the goal you are now heading towards and asking your mentor HOW? How did you achieve this goal? What were your strategies? What worked for you?

6) Failure? There’s no such thing as failure! So, what happens if you realize that you are heading off-track? Well, if one approach doesn’t work, change your approach! And which new approach to use? Well, change doesn’t equate to progress, you could change your strategy but not progress. Let’s prevent this by remembering that progress comes from understanding and implementing feedback. This feedback from the strategy which didn’t work can help you decide which strategy to use next. In this way, we can all be comforted by the fact that there is no such thing as failure- We never fail as we always get a result that we can use. All we need to do is ask ourselves some better questions: What does this different outcome mean? What can I now learn from it? And how can I share this learning with others? This ‘failure’ has changed in meaning and now becomes ‘feedback’. When we now implement this feedback we progress towards our dreams.

7) Finally- Celebrate! What gets rewarded gets conditioned and what gets conditioned becomes permanent. So let’s all commit to recognizing the steps we are making towards our goals and celebrating- well done us!