How do I keep my New Year’s resolution?
The new year symbolizes a fresh start and this year, millions of people in Canada have resolved to improve some area of their lives, from losing weight to working harder. Making a New Year’s resolution is easy – the tricky part, the pain point, is keeping it. All too often our busy schedules and bad habits keep us from attaining our goals.
According to Maxwell Maltz, author of Psycho-Cybernetics, it only takes 28 days to make something a habit. If you stick to your resolution for just 28 days, you will set yourself up for success for the year. Here are some tips from Paradigm Public Relation’s award winning staff to help you stick with it for those crucial first 28 days and beyond.
- Write it down.
- Create a 28-day calendar to track your progress. Imagine how satisfying it will be to check off each day you stick to your resolution.
- This is a lot like sticking to a communication plan’s critical path. Take it one day and one step at a time.
- Make sure your goal is attainable.
- Telling yourself you will go to the gym every day is probably not going to happen if you currently fail to make it there once a week. Set yourself up for success, and then build. Set reasonable goals that you can measure. What’s the point of setting out to do something if you can’t track and measure your success?
- It is the same whether your resolution is personal or business related: it’s important to set measurable goals. Measurable goals should be set at the outset of every public relations or social media plan. See more about the importance of measurement in the post below called, “How do you know if a project is successful?”
- Embrace setbacks, and even plan for them.
- One or two setbacks are almost inevitable. It is how we react to those setbacks that determine if we will stick with our resolutions. Embrace them as a challenge and an opportunity to recommit to your goal, instead of seeing them as a failure.
- The same can be said for a public relations or social media campaign. You need to be prepared for curveballs and bumps in the road – it’s Murphy’s Law that if something can go wrong it will. The best way is to plan ahead and have a plan B.
- Hold yourself accountable.
- Tell all your friends and colleagues about your goal. Knowing that others around you are watching will give you that extra push you need to stick with it!
- At Paradigm Public Relations, we provide our clients with a critical path of tasks and deadlines. This helps us to stay organized and on track with our projects, and keeps the client informed about the status of the project. Why not try doing the same for your personal projects? Free critical path templates can easily be found online.
Whether you’ve set a personal or work-related goal, it’s always a good idea to look back at what you’ve learned and make adjustments. If you didn’t fare as well as you had planned for the first 28 days, list the reasons why, and apply those learnings to the next 28.
Good luck and Happy New Year from the team at Paradigm Public Relations!