New Year, New You – Crafting a Plan for Success

Recommended Listening – Push It To the Limit by Paul Engemann

Every year on December 31st the ball drops, people celebrate, and a wealth of new goals are made when the clock strikes midnight. The very next day those goals start to manifest with all of this energy from these newly formed personal pacts. And people begin pushing themselves to the limit.

You can literally see it everywhere…

You go to the gym and you can’t find a parking spot because it is filled with people who have brand new fitness goals they are going to achieve. You try to connect with a friend on Snapchat, Instagram, or Facebook and they don’t respond because they’ve vowed to limit their social networking time. The library doesn’t have all of the books you want to read because people have committed to reading more. And our economy struggles because after the new year people want to spend less and save more (the holidays are a killer!).

But sadly, cue Sarah McLaughlin’s In the Arms of an Angel, 80% of these goals fail by February according to Psychology Today. You may even begin to see it right now with your own goals. Maybe you have already started missing days at the gym for that brand new fitness goal or disconnecting from Snapchat isn’t quite panning out (gotta keep the streak alive). So what are you supposed to do? Quit? Absolutely not!

I’ll be honest, for a great majority of my life I fell into the 80% category. I’d craft goals that had no measurable outcomes or follow through. Two years ago I created the following goal: “I want to lose weight.” That’s it. That was the goal. With a very descriptive goal like that, you can guess the outcome. I was successful! I lost 1 lb that year! Had that been my success story, this article would have probably started something like this…

And if you listen to me, you can lose a whopping 1lb too over the course of 365 days! Here’s how I did it:

• Make an ambiguous goal. Last year, my goal was “I want to lose weight.”
• Don’t make a plan of how you  are going to achieve it. I mean, c’mon, I took all that time to write those five words – I…want…to…lose…weight. What more do you want from me?
• Have no measurable benchmarks to keep you motivated while you are working towards a larger goal. Benchmarks? I don’t need any benchmarks. It’s all in my head of how I’m going to achieve it…says the person who doesn’t achieve their goals.

If you follow this plan, you too will be well on your way to underachieving in your goals!

I digress.

As I mentioned earlier, there are a lot of very similar goals to mine out there with all of the right intentions, and none of the follow through. So how do you prevent yourself from falling into that gap?

I asked myself that same question last year and decided to do something different. I wanted to write a book. If that was my goal, and I wanted a different outcome, I needed to research and make a plan. Here were the 3 steps I took in order to achieve that goal….

Step 1: Create a SMART Goal.

The first thing I needed to do was create a goal that was Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Timely. My whole life I had wanted to write a book. Given my experience of working with high school students I had decided I was going to write something on life, career, and money that I never got to teach in the classroom. To add to that I wanted to do it in seven months (I chose seven because of some personal events I had affecting my timeline). After some cleaning up and rephrasing here was my SMART Goal:

SMART GOAL:  Write a 15 chapter book on life, career, and money for high school students by July 31st, 2018.

This brought me to step 2.

Step 2: Develop a Plan.

This is where the real fun started. That’s a great goal, but how was I going to accomplish it? My plan needed to address three things:

1. 1. What will my benchmark goals be, that is, what will be the small goals that lead to the accomplishment of the larger goal?
   2. What type(s) of habits will I develop to accomplish my goal?
   3. How will I track my progress?
   4. Who will help me along the way?

Creating Benchmark Goals

I had figured out from past experiences that I’m a number’s guy. So if I was going to trick my brain into accomplishing this, numbers were going to be involved. My first goal that I crafted was to write 5,000 words a week. I adopted this from listening to Stephen King on Writing. In the book, he mentioned that 1,000 words a day was a good number to strive for. In also doing some research I found that chapters are typically between 3,000 and 5,000 words. So if I were writing that each week, that meant that I was producing a chapter a week. In 16 weeks, or 4 months, I would have 15-16 chapters or the first draft of my book. I knew in my experience of writing comedy, that there would be a lot to edit and some of the writing just wouldn’t make the cut. That was the first part of my plan – write 1,000 words a day.

Creating Habits

In reading The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg I learned that in order to really accomplish my goals, I needed to create habits. These habits would help me keep going when I no longer wanted to because I would have trained my brain to do so. Charles created a very simple formula to do this. It was cue + routine + reward = habit. So I needed all of the aforementioned in order to build my habits. My cue was simple – it was my alarm. My alarm would go off at 5:00 AM and would start my routine. My routine was to drink a glass of water, followed by making a cup of coffee, and eating a yogurt (gotta eat). I would then head downstairs and begin writing. But what about my reward?

Tracking Progress

I love seeing progress. For me, as simple as it may seem, my reward was tracking my progress. I would track how many times I was able to successfully get downstairs to write by 5:15 and would also do a word count every day. Soon thereafter I was producing, depending on the month, between 15,000 and 30,000 words a month, which I consider quite a feat for a non-writer. I also began tracking progress of the entire book. There is no greater visual than post-its on your wall. I used post-its to categorize my brainstormed ideas and to also track overall progress of the book. Here is a photo. 

Building Community

Next, I knew I needed a new community. I was in a brand new space for me and needed the help of those that had already been doing what I was trying to do. I formed ideas of how I was going to begin to build this community. It consisted largely of hiring a writing coach and getting involved with writing groups. I set a deadline of when I was going to hire a writing coach and begin to find these communities (Meetups are great places to start). I can not begin to emphasize this enough, but surrounding myself with the right people was absolutely crucial in me achieving the greater goal of writing a book (and should definitely be a focus for you as well).  

Step 3: Stick with the Plan

I am here to formally announce that I am a reformed perfectionist. For a long time, I have believed that there is a right way of doing things, and if I wasn’t doing things that right way, it shouldn’t be done. This is a good methodology to have to an extent, but… in the greater scheme of things, it can prevent you from getting things done at all.

Fellow perfectionists, raise your hand if you have looked over something in attempts to make it perfect and failed, resulting in you leaving the project in its’ entirety? (Chances are no one’s hands went up…because they’re perfectionists. To admit such an atrocity would be admitting that they are, in fact, not perfect. This is why I say I am reformed.)

In order to stick with the plan, I was going to have to abandon my ingrained ideas of perfection.

If I said I was going to write 5,000 words in a week and I only wrote 3,000, that was really hard for me. In the past, something like that may have derailed me entirely from the larger project of writing the book.

I knew this wasn’t going to work. I had to change the manner in which I thought. Instead of looking at it as underachieving, I had to celebrate those 3,000 words. After all, it was 3,000 more than I had at the beginning of the week. If you struggle with this as well, put the perfection aside, stick to the plan, and focus on getting better each week. That mindset will be crucial for your larger goal

In the end, my goal was a roller coaster of a ride with some months being better than others. I repeatedly pushed myself to the limit, but in the end, I accomplished my goal. The book will be released in Fall of 2019.

Stay tuned.