We’re 5 Mondays away from 2014, and one very common personal practice people often do before the year ends (and they announce it to themselves on the night of the 31st of December) is the NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION. 

Now the tip for this week, is inspired from the life of Strategists, those who think years in advance, plan for the unpredictable and execute to achieve goals others thought would be unlikely to be realized (at the current time). Being a Strategist myself, I have always felt at ease planning for my professional life & my personal goals (Except with love life where all the planning and strategies of the world won’t help 🙂 ); So i’d like to give you a Quick Virtual Coaching in this post.

Let’s start with your NYR: A New Year’s resolution is a promise that you make to yourself to start doing something good or stop doing something bad on the first day of the year; then in order to do that you need to start listing all the good things that you appreciate along with all the things that you didn’t like in 2013, and move on to writing the things that you need to stop doing and the things you will start doing in 2014.

Now think about this quote for a minute: 

“Vision without execution is hallucination.” ~ Thomas A. Edison

The question I have for you now is the following: if Thomas didn’t have a Vision and a Goal, how would’ve he looked at his failures?  

The 2013 Last Question: Who Do you want to be in 2016? 

It’s important to ask yourself this question as you are evaluating your NYR and not before.  Because you will start seeing black dots on your paper sheet that you considered failures before while they were not, and some achievements that they might not be that impressive.

In your mind, draw a mental image of the person you want to be in 2016, how will you look like, what will you be doing, how happy you should be, where will you be living and so on…

and finally,

Drive the road of 2014: Ghandhi once said: “Speed is irrelevant is you’re going in the wrong direction” so use 2014 as the path to get to where you want to be 2 years from now… The person you ASPIRE to be. Taking small steps towards working on things you don’t like about yourself and small steps towards the things you want to have in your life; On your way, you will find bumps, and roadblocks but as well, you will find friends and opportunities… so keep driving and put a target to reach where you want to be… and who knows.. 2016 might be closer than you think :).

Have a great week!
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Samer Chidiac is a Sr. Strategist, Author & an International Innovation Expert.

The Monday Tip Weekly blog is part of the “Influencing the Life of Others” project