Curated by the Knowledge Team of ICS Career GPS
Education
How to actually keep your New Year resolutions
Excerpts from article by Tracy Brower published in Forbes
We’re all looking forward to where 2021 will take us—and perhaps best of all it will take us out of 2020.
According to a classic study, only 19% of people accomplish their new year resolutions. So, here are 10 tips, which can put you on a path towards a positive 2021:
#1 Make it Real
Distinguish between your overall vision and habits. Focus on your big bets but be specific about the daily habits that will lead you to success. Be sure your habits are specific and actionable. While your aim may be to ‘be a better person,’ a powerful habit will be to volunteer at your preferred agency for an hour per week.
#2 Be Reasonable
You’ve heard it before, but it bears repeating: ensure your aims are attainable. Set ambitious targets but in a manner that’s attainable, and keep in mind that you can build over time. This year, you may learn the rudimentary grammar for a second language and seek to spend an hour a week with a native speaker. Perhaps in subsequent years, you can seek to be truly fluent.
#3 Tie your Actions to your Identity
Fascinating research has identified that people have more success shifting their behaviours when they link them with their identity, rather than using willpower. If you tell yourself something like, “I am not a person who shirks my responsibility to fitness,” or, “I am a person who keeps my commitments to myself,” or “I am a person who values action over slacking,” you will be more likely to make strides towards your new, preferred behaviours.
#4 Link your Habits
Another powerful way to successfully adopt a new set of habits is to link a new practice to an existing one. For example, if your big goal is to expand your knowledge and you’ve decided you want to listen to informative books more often, link your listening to another habit that is already part of your daily repertoire. Perhaps every day while you’re brushing your teeth and getting ready, you can listen to your Audible book selection.
#5 Establish Accountability
Write down your targets. This will help you be accountable to yourself. In addition, share your goals with others and ask them to check in with you and give you feedback. If your goal is to avoid procrastinating on your projects at work, ask your colleague to give you a friendly nudge when they hear you putting things off. Or if you want to do daily push-ups, ask your roommate to give you a gentle reminder if evening is approaching and you haven’t completed the task.
#6 Share the Process (Or the Pain)
One of the best ways to keep your resolutions is to make them mutual. Partner with others who have the same aims. If your goal is to be more creative, find a buddy with whom you can craft regularly. Or if your objective is to run a marathon, find a friend with whom you can train daily. If you want to lose your Covid weight gain, establish a small group of similarly-minded pals with whom you can commit and commiserate.
#7 Realise the power of Small Steps and mark progress
An important strategy in maintaining changes in behaviour is to reduce your perception of effort. An interesting example, published in Sports Medicine, found people stuck with their exercise programmes for longer periods of time when they drank coffee. The reason: because the caffeine gave them bursts of energy and reduced their perception of exertion. Incremental effort works this way as well. Take small steps. Also, track your progress over time. Use a calendar and mark off the days you’ve accomplished your new behavioural goals.
#8 Take Breaks
As the saying goes, “Everything in moderation, even moderation.” Build in days when you can celebrate. For example, if your goal is to do intermittent fasting, plan for one day a week when you eat throughout the day. If you plan for small moments of reprieve from your new behaviour, you won’t be cheating (read: you won’t have to beat yourself up). You can help ensure you give yourself time to take a breath and recharge for the next bout of following the new rules.
#9 Manage your Mindset
Changing behaviours isn’t easy. Your current ways of doing things have carved pathways in your brain, and establishing new linkages can be uncomfortable. Get comfortable with discomfort and reassure yourself you can do it. You have some exciting aspirations and if they were easy, they probably wouldn’t be worth doing. Those who achieve their resolutions are distinguished from those who don’t by the ability to put aside short-term satisfaction for long-term gain. Consider how you’ll feel immediately compared with the trade-off over time.
#10 Remember your Purpose
Perhaps most important for your ongoing motivation is to remember your overall purpose. You want to acquire a new skill, so you can make an awesome contribution at work and have terrific credibility in your field. You want to learn a language, so you can make a greater contribution in your community. Or you want to get healthy, so you can provide support for your family over the long term. The big picture is always motivational.
The pandemic has been terrible and horrible, but it has provided the opportunity to learn, grow and become more resilient.
Career
7 simple questions to help form your 2021 career goals
Excerpts from article by Jennifer Liu published in Make it
In a more normal year, common career goals might include landing a new job, getting a promotion or learning new skills. But depending on how the Coronavirus Pandemic has impacted your life, not to mention your job, the plans you set for yourself at the beginning of 2020 may not have played out as expected.
Here are the questions career coaches say you should ask yourself to kick off and guide your goal-setting:
1. What have you accomplished this year?
Before you start thinking about 2021, take stock of everything you accomplished in 2020, says Akhila Satish, CEO of a leadership training programme. She adds, “Even if you had higher expectations for yourself, anything you accomplished during such a tumultuous year is worthy of your recognition and pride. Writing down your accomplishments will help you create a more positive mindset going into the New Year.”
2. What makes you come alive?
Pick one or two bigger goals to focus on, and then think through concrete steps that you can take each week or month in order to make progress, says entrepreneur and author Claire Wasserman. Wasserman says to think about the jobs, companies or industries where those skills, like community building and delegating, can translate into paid work. “Tap your networks, both social and professional, to learn about other opportunities, and to also find supporters. If you’re shouldering it all yourself, it won’t happen,” she says.
3. What do you not want?
Consultant Jackie Mitchell says sometimes clients have a hard time thinking about what they want to do and accomplish. So she likes to turn the question on its head and have them brainstorm: What type of work do they definitely not want to do?
Based on your experiences, you may already know that you don’t enjoy certain tasks or working in certain environments. From there, Mitchell says, think about what you would enjoy and ways to get closer to making that a part of your day-to-day.
4. What can you accomplish by yourself?
A lot of goals involve waiting on another party i.e. starting a new job requires waiting for job listings to be posted; waiting to hear back from the hiring manager; and waiting to go through the interview process. So coach Randstad RiseSmart suggests you plan for goals that you can accomplish entirely on your own.
Your ultimate goal may be to lock in a new job in 2021, but she recommends you build in achievements that don’t depend on anyone else. That could mean your new job goal includes researching a new company every week, or attending a networking event each month.
5. How are you spending your time each day?
Alexi Robichaux, CEO and co-founder of BetterUp, likes to do a periodic time audit and creates a pie chart that shows how he spends every hour in a day. From there, he can see how much time he spends on various tasks and meetings for work.
Others can do the same and, after reviewing their time pie chart, consider if they’re spending time on things that really matter most to them. If you’re spending more time than you’d like in one area, he says, set goals that can move you towards your ideal.
6. What would your perfect day look like?
Author and entrepreneur Ramit Sethi prefers to think of what his perfect day would consist of, and then work his way backwards to achieve that vision.
For example, he once realised that one component of his “perfect day” would be kicking it off with a leisurely two-hour breakfast. Outside of being on vacation, however, he had to think: “What is it about this idea that’s empowering to me? Then I realised, I want to have the freedom of a slow morning.” From there, he thought of concrete ways to work this into his routine: He began going to bed earlier, waking up earlier and not scheduling meetings first thing in the day.
7. What helps you find resilience every day?
If 2020 was a lesson in letting go of your original goals, 2021 is about sustaining the resilience you gained through challenging times, says Sarah Sheehan, co-founder of the coaching app Bravely.
Sheehan says you can apply those lessons to your intentions for the new year — for example, if you know exercising in the middle of the day helps you feel productive and focused, schedule that time for yourself in your workday. Or if you’ve come to dread video meetings, consider changing them to phone calls that you can take while on a walk outside.
(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in the article mentioned above are those of the author(s). They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of ICS Career GPS or its staff.)
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