Personal development for the new year

Well, it’s the first day back in the office after the holidays and you’re feeling bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to conquer the world. After all, this is a new year and a fresh start. How can you maximize your progress while reducing your stress?

• Focus your improvements on enhancing your strengths. You do this by adding knowledge and skills to your talents. You’re probably already attracted to your strengths because engaging them feels good and natural, so this will be a path of least resistance in the personal development department. You’re also going to get more mileage moving yourself from, say, a 7 to a 9 on a strength versus progressing from a 3 to a 5 on a non-strength area. If you don't know what your talents are, check out Now, Discover Your Strengths by Buckingham and Clifton and take their online assessment with the access code in the book.
  
• Rather than framing your various behaviors as strengths vs. weaknesses, think of the non-strength areas as simply that – non-strengths. They might have little impact on you if you are well developed in your strengths. (The fact that I am not a good distance runner has no impact on my effectiveness as a business and personal coach.) At the very least you might be able to develop a strength into a countermeasure for a non-strength. For instance, if you are not known for promptness but you have a strength in data analysis, create a graph that tracks your arrival time at the office, or that documents your average bed-to-office-door time.
  
• Turn intangible improvement ideas into tangible, observable behavior changes that you want to work on. If you want to be a better leader, define what that means. Will you increase your span of influence by taking on a leadership role in a volunteer organization? Will you read one self-development book per month?
  
• Lay out a goal plan for each initiative. Your plan should include the rewards of doing it, the consequences if you don’t, obstacles or potential obstacles, solutions, and action steps (how you’re going to move your hands and feet.)
  
• Also remember to include some intentional self-talk that relates to your goal; “I am an effective public speaker,” or “I show key clients how much I value their business,” or “I eat 5 servings of fruit or vegetables every day.” Affirmations can be reminders of the person you can become by talking as though you are there already.
  
  

Back in the day when I was working in a company that was aggressively pursuing quality we were told not to choose “world peace” as our first improvement project. I think the same advice applies here. Do some smaller, incremental improvements to generate confidence from early victories. Then work your way into the bigger stuff.

If you feel like one of your improvement ideas will require you to turn yourself into a pretzel to do it, think carefully. Are you starting with a strength or are you trying to overhaul a weakness? Are you expecting yourself to “go forth and sin no more” which I call an evergreen goal (and hard to sustain,) or are you creating a more digestible and finite project sort of goal?

Sometimes just a small improvement will make a huge positive difference in your results. What you choose to do isn’t as important as it is to simply do something. Make this year your best ever – starting today.