NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS VS. DAILY RITUALS
Everyone talks about setting resolutions at the start of the year, yet 85% of all New Year’s Resolutions are broken by the 15th of January … what I recommend is to determine your intentions for the year, have clearly defined goals and then create daily rituals that will bring your goals to fruition.
85% OF ALL NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS ARE BROKEN BY THE 15TH OF JANUARY.
For the last 30 years, I’ve been an advocate for never having a New Year’s Resolution. Part of my personal process is that I make time in December to think about the goals I want to achieve and in between Christmas and New Year’s I start to get more clarity around those goals. I then make time in early January to get crystal clear and specific on my key goals and create the daily rituals that will get me closer to achieving them.
If you haven’t set your 2018 goals yet, that’s ok, it’s never too late to start.
Here are the key areas you can use to set your 2018 goals:
Personal
These are the goals that relate to what you want to achieve personally in your life, the goal you want to achieve as a family, destinations you want to travel to and the challenges you want to conquer in the year ahead.
Professional
These are the goals that relate to your business, career, education or even the professional areas you want to improve upon as a leader or in the role you do. These goals are often easy to set because if you’re working in an organisation, the company tends to set these goals for you.
Physical
These are the goals that relate to your health, fitness and strength. They are about how fit you want to be or how trim you want to be or how strong you want to be either physically, mentally, emotionally or spiritually.
Profitable
These goals relate to your finances, the money want to spend, the money you want to save, the money you want to allocate for specific purchases during the next 12 months. It also relates to the debt you want to reduce or it could even be the debt you want to get into … if you want to buy your first home, a new home or investment property.
Once you have defined your goals it’s then about articulating the rituals you want to complete each day. To give you an example, here are some of my daily rituals at the moment …
- Exercise for 60 to 90 minutes
- Read for 15 to 30 minutes
- Drink 2 to 3 litres of water
- Meditate for 15 to 30 minutes
- Wake up between 5 and 6am and go to bed between 9.30 and 10.30pm
- Take my vitamin supplements
- Begin the day with 3 key objectives to achieve
- Eat clean, healthy food
For me personally, I have core daily rituals that are not negotiable, these are rituals that I want to do and I discipline myself to do each and every day. Then I have non-core rituals and it’s ok if I don’t do these rituals every single day. It all depends on what you’re trying to achieve personally and professionally at the time.
So I officially give you permission to let go of your New Year’s Resolutions! Instead, set specific goals and create daily rituals that will move you closer to what you really want to achieve in 2018.