The year is coming to an end. Once again, people are planning their new year resolutions and evaluating their life choices for this year. But this is not something that should be left at the end or the start of a new year. Evaluating your life in line with the vision of the life you desire, should be a continuous process throughout the year.
The truth is, without a Gregorian calendar, there is no difference between December 31
st and January 1
st. It’s just the dawn of a new day. And with each new day comes the opportunity to do things differently to achieve the results your heart desires. So rather than drinking to stupor during this festive season and run to church on the 31
st night praying to see a brand new year with promises to change, start making the changes you want to see now.
Every life is a story; a story we have the power to change. The era of sitting idly by waiting for God to come and miraculously bless us is over. Money will not just fall on you, neither will Bananas. The law of inertia proves that things don’t change unless they are compelled to. Also, being constantly busy does not guarantee success. One can be busy doing the wrong thing or expending energies in the wrong direction. To turn our life’s story around, we have to get up and make conscious decisions to do things differently.
I’m not disputing the fact that there are external factors in life that keep us stuck in a rut. Take for instance the number of failed systems in Nigeria that are not encouraging. This is where problem-solving skills and the ability to think outside the box or go the extra mile become useful.
Here are a few things you can do in order to make sure you keep to your resolutions:
- Have a vision – when you have a picture of the kind of outcome you want in any area of your life, it becomes easier to set goals on how to achieve them. Vision is the big picture but goals are the little details that help you achieve them. Without these guidelines, you can’t come up with strategies to effectively get to where you want to be in life.
- Always Analyse – be aware of your patterns, thoughts, behaviours or motives and how they drive you. Learn from your personal experiences before jumping to learn from other people’s experiences. What did you envisage for 2017 and did you achieve it? What can you do to improve on your goals to guarantee your vision becomes a reality? Find out what worked for you and what didn’t. Then find ways to improve on what worked or change what didn’t work for you.
- Make plans – In changing what failed to work for you, that’s where studying the lives/experiences of others, who have excelled where you are struggling, come in. It’s not a comparison to make you jealous or over-reaching, it is meant to be an honest assessment of your limitations in line with the strategies being employed by those it worked for. Be obsessed with personal growth, and also read a lot to gather the right information to enable you to make the right plans. Speak with people if you must on how to overcome the challenges you face. Find out what they did to get the results you long for and make a plan from their suggestions. Create your own system that will allow you succeed using time-tested principles.
- Take Action – Planning is a waste of time if you don’t take action. Knowledge not acted on will be lost with time. So do something about the plans we’ve made. It might be scary and seem overwhelming but take one step at a time. While implementing the plans, if you need a break, give yourself a break to recuperate and reassess your progress, and get back in the game.
We can make our resolutions a victory marker in our lives. We just have to be deliberate about doing it and don’t wait until the end of a year to assess our progress. Resolutions are to make us better, we can be better if we put our minds to it.
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This article was first published on 20th December 2017
ann
Ann Esievoadje is a freelance writer who is passionate about encouraging a reading culture and personal development. She has authored two books, The Quilt (fiction) and Being Mummy and Me (non-fiction). She manages Pulchra Publishing which offers a content creation/editing, transcription, different forms of writing (including Ghostwriting) service and her blog, Life Love and Anything Goes at annesievoadje.blogspot.com.ng. You can reach her at annesievoadje@gmail.com
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