This post is about preparing for a new year.
I always ask some of my clients to answer these questions in preparation for a new year. Answering them is a useful exercise to help us re-set and re-focus. They help us to take action on what we want to let go of and what we want more of in our professional and personal lives.
Here are the questions I pose:
1) What would you like to do differently this year (old habits you’d prefer not to repeat; dealing with something you avoided last year; creating an opportunity to innovate)?
2) What would you like more of in your professional life? What do you need to do to get it?
3) What would you like more of in your personal life? What do you need to do to get it?
4) If there was only one thing I could do to improve my business, what would it be and how would I make it happen?
5) If there was only one thing I could focus on to improve my personal performance, what would that be and how would I make it happen?
6) What messages am I not listening to or refusing to confront in my business and personal performance and how am I going to overcome that this year?
If we pause to reflect before embarking on a new beginning, we give ourselves a chance to make better, more intentional decisions about direction, goals and courses of action. We are often so busy with our day-to-day tasks that we don’t rise above the daily to-do list to get a broader viewpoint. These questions require us to think through what’s come before as a springboard for creating a road map for the future. We can review, compare, contrast and analyze possibilities to make important distinctions and, from that insight, better decisions about how to move forward.
If you haven’t done so already, this week ask yourself a few of the above-mentioned questions and create an exercise around it. Don’t just think about them for a minute and then put them aside. Write out answers. Commit to what you’ve written down to help you start the year off with new energy.
January is one of the few times we can demarcate a new start: It’s an opportunity to renew and refresh. Take advantage of this new beginning and ask yourself some good questions. You’ll have a chance to live the questions and the answers all year long.
Kathleen