We recently published the best New Year’s resolutions to make this year for your career. We had so much great advice from industry experts and wanted to follow up to get more information on trends and actionable plans. You have your goals, but how do you keep them top of mind and follow through? This series will expand on the advice from thought leaders and give you specific tasks to achieve your career goals.
Amy Wolfgang, CEO of Wolfgang Career Coaching, discusses why allowing yourself to do the things you want, turns into the things you end up needed. How how can you say “yes” this year? Read on:
1. How do you decide which goal, or barrier, you want to overcome?
What a great question! You could approach this in so many ways. For example, you could look backwards to identify the goals you wanted to achieve last year that you did not achieve. Then try to identify what kept you from achieving that goal. You may have to go down a few layers. If you decide ‘not enough time’ was the barrier, you might need to dig deeper to find out what prevented you from making the time.
Or instead of looking backwards, you could look forward and ask yourself, what theme do I want to live by this year? In deciding on a theme or a few words to anchor how you want to live this year, you can identify some barriers that prevent you for living this way.
2. How can you hold yourself accountable when trying new things?
Social support! One of the most powerful drivers of success is social support and enlisting others in your journey. Identify an individual or individuals who can be cheerleaders for you and send you messages of encouragement. Identify others who can be accountability partners with you and help hold you accountable.
3. What can you do after failure, or are having a hard time quieting your inner critic?
This journey will be full of failures. How is that for a positive statement!? This is a development journey for you and some weeks you will take two steps forward and one step back and other weeks you will take one step forward and two steps back.
A few ways to deal with failure: remember to focus on far you have come and not just on how far you have left to go. We oftentimes only see what is in front of us. Take a moment to appreciate how much work you have done to get to you the point you are at now.
“Remember, every flower that ever bloomed had to go through a whole lot of dirt to get there.” ~ Maria Delgado
Also, it may seem counter-intuitive but when we experience failure, it is a great time to express gratitude. Expressing gratitude counters negativity. It can be as simple as writing down what you are grateful for in the moment.
4. What are you giving yourself permission to do this year?
This year I am giving myself permission to do more of what makes me happy!
All too often we get caught up in the things we should do and forget to do the things we must do. This year allow yourself to fail and get back doing something you love and don’t apologize for it! Failure is part of the process, but how you overcome it will be how you achieve your goals.
