Name Your Year!
As we roll into the last days of 2020, I am hoping that many of you have taken time to reflect on where you want your business to be at the end of this year. Did you hit your goal? Were you just shy of your goal?
It is important to do that brief assessment of what happened and what did not happen in 2020 – I should say it this way, it is important IF YOU WANT THINGS TO BE DIFFERENT. If you want things to stay the same, then do exactly what you did this past year.
As I have shared many times before, just hoping you have different results or just saying things are going to be different does not make it happen. We have to think it through. Decide on the goals for the year. Commit to the goal. Create an action plan and commit to the action plan. Then get into action and DO the plan.
Every year, I talk about naming your year. Why Name your year? It is Fun and if helps you Focus. Starting off with three sheets of paper, here are some tips for how to name your year.
On the first sheet of paper, list all the times you feel as though you missed the mark in 2020. Now, remember, these are NOT failures!!!! Just opportunities from which to learn. Those could be places where you missed the mark. It may be personal. The key here is to capture what happened. Especially, what did not go well.
On the second sheet of paper, record all of your successes, lessons learned, breakthroughs, accomplishments, and prayers answered from 2020. Take time to go through and do this. It might take some journaling. Looking back over 2020, combing memories to pull out all of the good ones. The ones we really want to remember and highlight.
On the third piece of paper, write down how you will apply what you have learned about yourself in 2020 that you can use to improve in 2021. Now, visualize ahead to December 31, 2021. What successes, wins and breakthroughs have happened? Add these to the third sheet, writing them in the present tense as if they have already happened.
Select an accountability partner. Someone who will hold you to your goals, call you out on not doing the activity you committed to do, that type of person. Do not pick an accountability partner who will let you slide your way through missing goals.
Commit to your goal with an accountability partner AND by selecting an object to remember your theme. If your year is the year of the Phoenix perhaps – coming out of the fire – maybe you get a picture of an actual Phoenix climbing out of the fire. Another example might be if your theme is “the Year of Getting out of your Comfort Zone,” you may select a picture of something that terrifies you.
When you are naming your year, you want to ask yourself a lot of questions. You want to hone in on what you want to happen in the new year. You want to think through what the difference will be from 2020 to 2021. For some of you, you will know right off the bat: Maybe it is the “Year of Personal Growth” or the “Year of Abundance”.
I encourage you to Name Your Year AND do everything you can to make 2021 an outstanding year!!!
