A New Year and new opportunities. New decisions to be made. Super exciting and yet so scary for many people!
I’m not one for new years resolutions, but I tend to pick 1 or 2 focus areas for each year. These can be personal as well as professional and if you have more than 1 key area I would recommend they “work together” in moving your forward and helping you grow. When choosing our focus areas, we inevitably need to make new decisions for a range of things (unless your focus area is to get more of exactly the same thing you did last year).
Naturally most people get stuck on the HOW (i.e. how to make these decisions and not get paralyzed by fear whilst making them). So here are some things I often do and that you might find helpful:
- Allow yourself to say ‘no’ to things that you already know won’t help your new focus area(s). Do you need to finish a volunteer position, quit your job, set some new boundaries in your family, stop dating someone or spend less time with certain people? Saying no is always harder in the beginning (as most of us don’t like the idea of disappointing others), but I assure you it does get easier with time!
- Give space for new opportunities to come into your world. This gets a lot easier by doing step one first and also being clear on your personal values. This is also greatly helped by reaching out to certain people in your networks specifically with skills around your focus areas for the year. For example, if your focus area for 2018 is health and fitness, reach out to friends and other connections who can help you frame HOW you’re going to start and then keep doing activities around this throughout the year. Of if you’re focusing on financials in 2018, speak to people who can help you with finance strategies. I’m not saying opportunities will automatically come your way, so you need to keep your eyes open here, take initiative and get creative!
- Create some leverage around why your focus areas are more important than other things. Write down as many reasons as you can (minimum 20 per focus area!) as to why this is important to you and what it will allow you to do, be and have.
- Create some urgency and rewards around your focus areas. What will happen if you don’t focus on this/these areas in 2018? How will you feel if December 2018 comes around and you did not follow through? How will you reward yourself? Without reward it get’s much harder to keep showing up. And finally; what milestones are you aiming for? A new home? A weight loss goal? A new job?
- Remember that fear is natural. Everyone feels it, even those who look like they ‘have it all sorted’. The key is not to have a life free of fear, but the ability to act in spite of fear. The fear will never go away, so find the courage to make decisions anyway.
If you’re feeling stuck in making the next step you might also want to consider this strategy from Seth Godin.
I also wanted to share some changes you’ll start to see from us at The Bridge Coaching this year! We’ll move to a fortnightly newsletter instead of weekly and you’ll also see that we’ll do lots more videos than we have before. I’ve also got some really cool career support tools in the pipeline that I’ll be sharing with you all soon!
If you’re not already following us on Facebook and YouTube I’d recommend you do for inspiration, free tools and lots of ideas on how to move forward in your career! Remember that you can always get in touch via hello@thebridgecoaching.com.au if you prefer to chat to me directly.