How To Set Your Intentions For The New Year To Ensure Success
Thank you for spending time with me today, and let’s get this party started, and it’s all about setting your new year’s resolutions, your intent, whatever you want to accomplish for the year. You want to set your intentions for a new year to ensure success.
I’m looking at a headline here from “Business Insider” that says, “80% of new year’s resolutions will fail by February.” And that’s true. I used to set new year’s resolutions, and I don’t anymore.
I set a theme. I set a theme to something that I want to accomplish. It needs to be meaningful. It’s something that you want to do, not something that you should do.
QUESTIONS THAT ARE ANSWERED IN THIS PODCAST
[2:20] Why pick a theme and not a resolution
[4:00] How to create accountability
[7:00] How to drive behavior with questions
[7:30] Other theme examples
Why Did I Pick Themes?
The reason I picked the themes is that it’s really worked for me. I’ve been doing for the last 10 years or so, and so I wanted to share with you my process on how I pick those themes and how I let that sort of run the gamut. How I use that throughout daily and weekly activities to ensure that I’m successful in those themes.
How to measure
Part of it is it has to be measurable. So it is kind of back to goal-setting 101, but you can still wrap it within a theme, and one of the tips and tricks that I do for it is I say this saying or sentence to myself often. I say, “Look, if I’m focusing on X,” whatever my theme is for the year, “what behavior do I do or would I choose or decision would I make at this moment to get me to that theme?”
My 2018 theme
My theme this year for 2018 is consistency. I’m going to say it’s actually my theme again, because in 2017 I wasn’t as consistent as I wanted to be, and
I had three areas I wanted to be consistent:
- I wanted to create content and assets in a consistent manner, and I had set out for 10 minutes four times a week. This is what I had set out for ’17, and this is where I started in ’18, and I’ll give you an update where I’m at in ’18.
- I wanted to ensure I was creative. I had done that in the past, and I loved it, but I wasn’t making time, and so I had to make it as part of this theme this year. I said I only want to do 20 minutes a week, and I know these seem like really small goals and really small measurements, but you’ve got to figure out what works for you. For me, I had to pick something that was low-barrier that I can do. If I can’t do 10 minutes or 20 minutes a day, then I don’t have an excuse. So I had to set that tone and make sure I could achieve it.
- The third area that I wanted to be consistent was in that movement and fitness area. Again, I said 10 minutes four times a week. That is totally achievable. I could honestly do it between flights, I could take a walk around the block, I could achieve that quickly. And that’s what I needed to do for myself to get going.
Now, the update that I have for 2018, that I’ve just modified here in the last week or two, is that instead of 10 minutes four times a week, I’ve committed to two areas for content. It’s funny when you start putting ideas out there on what you want to accomplish, then the universe, whatever you believe in, will bring you those opportunities.
How to create accountability
As soon as I declared that, an opportunity to be part of a Facebook group that had a YouTube challenge, which was to publish one video a week, and I said, “Perfect, I will do that so I could be held accountable, and I will have a group to go to, and I like that.”
Give a quick stretch goal
The second thing I did is I just decided on a whim, and I said, “Why don’t I just start publishing content daily on LinkedIn?” And that freaked me out, so I’ve been at it here for a couple weeks, and it’s been going good, but I will definitely report back in the end of 90 days to see where it’s going.
Those were the two adjustments that I did, and again, I mentioned this is a theme that I had done in 2017, and I’m going to continue in 2018, because I didn’t quite put the techniques in place to master it and really understand what I needed to do to make it successful.
I had started this practice about 10 years ago when I wanted to start to date, and it took me probably three years to get to the dating ones. I had a theme every year too, like, find love, and literally, I didn’t find it, because I was not doing any activities.
If you remember the sentence that I shared earlier about if I’m focusing on X, which is my theme, what behavior would I do or choose to move me forward?
How I found love
Well, when I started looking at the behavior, and I said I wanted to date, if I wasn’t even going to dating sites, how the heck was I going to find love? So I said, “Okay, fine, I need to start going to dating sites and taking other actions and letting people know that I’m dating and doing other activities.”
And then, once I started joining the dating sites and other options, then I wasn’t responding back, and so I had to push myself beyond that, saying, “Okay, is this behavior focusing on finding love and dating?”
“No.”
So if it was the behavior that I wanted to focus on finding love, what would I be doing? I would be having at least two conversations a week and at least one date in person a week, or whatever that was.
That’s how I used that sentence to drive my behavior, and sometimes it’s daily behavior, and sometimes it’s weekly behavior, but that sentence has been really, really helpful, and it’s also the fact that I’ve added something in there that’s measurable. I shared with you four times a week to create content, or two in-person dates a month.
Other themes examples to set your new year intentions to ensure success
The other themes that I’ve heard other people wanted:
- confidence
- fearless
- have more gratitude
- show more gratitude
- perform one new activity a week
- do something that absolutely terrifies them once a month
- daily gratitude for their self and then gratitude once a week for people around them.
So that’s how you’re going to start to have that self-talk and making sure that you’re focusing on those areas for the theme that you’re picking.
I would definitely say for me, I learned to pick a no- or low-barrier activity, and I had to make it as simple as possible, so I had no excuses. I shared with you how 10 minutes a day wasn’t much, but it’s enough to get going and getting yourself in that habit.
Easy to incorporate into life
I’ve also discovered that doing these themes, it’s really kind of that way of life for a year, and I do it so that I can really incorporate it into my life, and it gets to be part of me. It’s just not a whim and something that’s trendy or a fad or whatever.
And so when I pick that theme, it’s really something that I’m going to live with and something I want to work on. It could be something that I have to revisit, and so who knows?
Maybe in two or three years I might have to have this theme again, to come back and make sure I’m consistent. Haven’t had to repeat a theme, and so I keep adding themes of areas that I want to focus on in my life, and I’ve really enjoyed the themes.
Next Steps: How To Set Your Intentions For The New Year To Ensure Success
The action that I would love for you to do is:
- Pick a theme
- Publicly declare it, share it with your husband, your family, if you’ve got a coach or a mastermind group that you’re working with
- Live it
- Let me know, please come back here and let me know how it’s going
Show Notes Link
To get the show notes for this episode, please go to http://kimdsnyder.com/007. Thank you for listening to this episode.
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