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Ring in the New Year with Intention

Guest post by: Kathy Paauw

Article Overview: Studies have shown that many people start off the New Year with resolutions, and by the third week into January, they've already "blown it" and have given up on striving toward those goals.

Ring in the New Year with Intention

Studies have shown that many people start off the New Year with resolutions, and by the third week into January, they've already "blown it" and have given up on striving toward those goals.

Although many people start working toward achieving goals the first of the year, we can start fresh anytime we choose! It's okay to make mistakes, as long as we learn from them and make adjustments. That's just the way we learn.

I've found three key ingredients to successful planning for the New Year:

1. Celebrate your wins for the past year.
2. Clarify your intentions for the coming year, as well as the motivations behind them!
3. Build daily accountability and support into your daily life as you live the coming year with intention.

I’ll share a few great tools that will help you incorporate these ingredients into your planning.

1. CELEBRATE YOUR WINS

Before planning for 2012, I encourage you to celebrate your wins for 2011. You may not realize how much you have accomplished, so I'll share a resource that will help you to record and celebrate your wins. Jim Bunch is a Life Coach I have worked with, and he offers a free tool to help you remember all of your wins for 2011. Click here to access his Year-end Reviw process.

2 . CLARIFY YOUR INTENTIONS

Are you likely to usher in the New Year with optimism, gratitude and clarity? Or are you more likely to greet 2012 with pessimism, a scarcity mentality, and confusion?

Although the news focuses on the doom and gloom of our present economy and it’s easy to be in “auto-pilot” mode and buy into that, you also have the option of choosing what you focus on. What you focus on will have a profound impact on what happens in your life in the coming year.

To thrive in 2012, stay in gratitude, maintain a positive emotional state (despite what others say), keep focused on your goals, learn new skills, take inspired actions, and develop supportive habits.

You probably have a few New Year’s resolutions for yourself, but do you have written goals that are specific, measurable, and BIG enough to really take you to the next level? If not, Jack Canfield offers a simple and effective worksheet for plotting out your goals and intentions for the coming year.

Jack's worksheet is an excellent tool for getting clear about what you would like to be different in several areas of your life. When you complete this worksheet, I encourage you to dig as deep as you can for the WHY behind your intentions. For example, if one of your goals is to leave your office by 5 PM daily, you might be inclined to write down for your WHY, "Work less hours." Identify what is behind your goal that has some juice to it! A deeper WHY might be, "so I can be home for dinner with my family and build deeper bonds with my spouse and kids." The best way to uncover the deeper WHY is to ask yourself "so what?"

Complete this sentence as many times as you need to in order to uncover the deeper WHY::

I want ______ (your goal) so that I can ________ (your deeper why).

Every time you say YES to someone or something, you are, in fact, saying NO to someone or something else. By identifying the deeper WHY, you are creating a more compelling reason to say NO to an old habit or activity so you are available to say YES to a new intention.



3. BUILD IN ACCOUNTABILITY AND SUPPORT

Begin connecting daily with an accountability partner. Share three daily intentions with your partner by sending an email. Identifying three kinds of intentions daily – happy, healthy, and wealthy--will provide balance in your life, which is a very important part of success. Why strive for wealth if we are not happy and healthy in the process?

You determine what will make you happy, healthy and wealthy, however you define each of those. In order for this to work, you and your accountability partner will need to commit to emailing each other by the end of the previous day for the next day. In that email, you'll report DONE or NOT DONE for the intentions you had for that day, and you'll also list your intentions for tomorrow.

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Article Tags: focus, goal setting, mental focus, New Year Resolutions, success



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