Making This Your Best Year Yet: The One Hour Challenge

A great many of us make both business and personal resolutions to start the year - but even just a few weeks later, the vast majority of them have been given up or just forgotten about as we revert to business as usual and let circumstances take over.

One of the problems is that most of us enter into the process completely unprepared. We often fail at New Year resolutions simply because from the outset we focus on the negative rather than the positive benefits of the change.

The temptation is to see resolutions as personal, but they are very useful in a business context. According to the Chartered Management Institute (CMI), the top New Year's resolution for managers for 2010 was to put their team's development first, ahead of traditional priorities such as networking or spending more time with customers and clients. However, the report also shows there managers believe there three key barriers which will make it hard for to keep their resolutions for the New Year; lack of time (75%), reduced budgets (42%) and a reduced workforce (33%).

At the very point where many of us brand these ambitions as unachievable, what can we do to see them through? Stephen Covey encourages us to start with the end in mind, working from our imagination, not from memory, and to spend the time creating our vision statements that combine the mental picture of what we are about, with the practices or actions that will have mean we are dong that.

So we challenge you to put aside just one hour every week to craft your personal vision.

It sounds so simple, yet as we allow circumstances outside our immediate sphere of influence to take over, we can easily lose our sense of freedom and control. Our feelings, attitudes and behaviours reflect our beliefs that it's too late or too difficult and so on.
But why shouldn't our professional and personal resolutions work out as intended? What would life be like if they did? In starting with the end in mind, Covey advocates creating a personal vision that includes each of the key areas and relationships in your life:

• personal
• family
• team
• organisational

Creating a meaningful vision for each and any of these takes time and patience, and does require you to draw on your self-awareness, creative imagination and openness to possibility.

So important is starting with the end in mind, that we challenge you to put aside just one hour in your week, every week. Make it dedicated time to consider, if this was to be your 'Best Year Yet', what would it look like? Who would you be (your character) and what would you do (your actions)?

Then ask yourself these questions:

• What would be happening for you/your team/your organisation?
• What would you your team/your organisation be doing?
• Where would you your team/your organisation be spending more/less time?
• Who would you your team/your organisation be 'being' to have it this way?

The CMI found that as well as focusing on staff through skills development, more than a quarter (27%) had resolved to acknowledge the efforts of their staff and say 'thank you' more often; and just under a fifth (18%) also said they will spend more time with their teams.
So, what's your vision and how will you be walking your talk this year?

"If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there."
Lewis Carroll