For years now, I’ve had this homemade ritual. Sometime during the last week of every year I find a quiet place in my home with a brand new journal. All those crisp, white pages empty with possibility. I light a candle and write down in the first pages all my aspirations for the coming year. One year it was to design, develop and produce a series of workshops. Another year it was to host and produce a cable TV show. Yet another year it was to heal my relationship with my mother. In they went into my journal often with a blessing or wish for fruition.
In the last few years I’ve changed the recipe a bit. Instead of writing my aspirations, I write my aspir-actions. A combination of my deepest intentions for the New Year - coupled with real life action steps to turn my “wish for fruition” into a done deal.
Statistics from the American Society for Training and Development show that the likelihood of a person completing a goal breaks down as follows:
Conceive an idea - 10%
Consciously decide to adopt an idea - 25%
Decide when they will do it - 40%
Plan how they will do it - 50%
Commit to someone else that they’ll do it - 65%
And when they have a specific accountability appointment with the person they have committed to - 95% actually complete the goal.
As a Life & Business Coach I fully agree. I’ve seen it over and over in my own life and all the women and men I’ve worked with through the years. When someone holds you in your Greatness, then helps you envision and define your grandest goals with specific action steps, and then adds the crucial ingredient, accountability, THEN your dream can really bloom. So to get you started, here are seven result-producing steps called “The Power of Momentum” that will turn your aspirations into aspir-actions.
Get Clear
To begin, get clear about where you really are now. Here are some questions to ask yourself or journal on to get the juices flowing.
What did you love about 2006?
- What did you accomplish?
- What were your magical moments?
- What would you like to carry through or continue in 2007?
- What was challenging this past year?
- What do you not want to have happen again?
- What did you learn by going through these experiences?
- What was the golden nugget of truth for you in 2006?
- What decisions did you make in 2006 that were empowering for you?
- What decision might you make next year as a result?
When you get clear about the present, when you review and digest what was, then what can be will be.
Get Certain
By now you’ve gained some clarity about 2006. Now you need to create certainty about your capacity to take your dreams or goals for 2007 and make them real. To start, write down anything in your life that you have already achieved that was once merely just a goal, dream or desire. Big or little. Hard or easy. It doesn’t matter. Now circle two or three items on your list that seemed the most difficult to achieve and write down the steps you went through to turn each one of them a reality. You may not have done it consciously, but it’s likely something stimulated you to want to want them. What was the impetus? What did you focus on continuously? What was the quality of emotions involved? Did you actually create a plan?
Now that you’re clear about 2006 and you have certainty about your ability to make a dream or goal real, where do you want t
