The New Year Strategy

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January 2015

Happy New Year! What’s your New Year’s resolution? 

As this New Year kicks into gear, we’ve all probably come up with some personal resolutions that we want to accomplish in 2015.  For example, some of us want to lose a little weight, or some of us want to make a little more money.  While these are great things to focus on, the vast majority of us will ultimately fail at achieving these resolutions from a variety of reasons like a lack of will, bad execution, poor planning, etc.   To make the most of our resolutions and give us the best chance of success, we have to put some deeper thought into developing our goals.

I’m sure you have heard the expression: History repeats itself.   In school, I never understood the importance of History class, until I realized it’s real world applications.  While it’s important to keep our eyes on the future and put the past behind us, if we don’t take the time to analyze how we’ve operated in the past (both positively and negatively), then it is very difficult to know the best pathway to success in the future.  While tedious, we should all take the time to conduct a SWOT analysis on ourselves before determining what kind of goals to set.  The goal of this project is to analyze your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.  Go ahead, take out a pen and paper and start writing.  This is step one in setting strong goals for the New Year. 

Once we complete our SWOT analysis and really understand what areas we strive, as well as struggle, we can begin to select our goals and outline the pathway to success.  If our mission is to create SMART (Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound) goals, then the SWOT analysis should have pointed us in the right direction.  By thinking about our Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats, we’ve already made our end-goals Relevant.  On top of that, we can know if our goals are Attainable based on looking at our past and what we have been able to accomplish, as well as what obstacles may be in the way.   Lastly, because we’ve taken the time to collect info in our SWOT analysis, we can now consolidate this into a Specific and Measureable goal.  Really, at the end of this, the only thing you will need to do is figure out is how long do you want to give yourself to reach the goal (which may also come up in your SWOT analysis!). 

We’ve probably heard it before in some form or fashion: It’s hard to know where you’re going without knowing where you came from.  As we continue to climb our individual mountains and view the obstacles ahead in the New Year, it’s imperative that we take a minute to look back down the hill at the accomplishments and mistakes we made along the way.   This gives us the knowledge and power to make adjustments, push ourselves harder and set goals that will remain with us for more than the first 2 weeks of the New Year!

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