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Yes, you read that headline right. Another year is here upon us and there will be people all around you talking about their New Year resolutions, flaunting them like gold medals only to be disappointed a few weeks or months later when they fail to keep up with their resolutions.
Statistics worldwide have shown that only a small percentage of people are able to keep their resolutions, while most of them start faltering and then feeling miserable. One of the best proofs of that is in the increase in the number of gym memberships at the start of the year and then the actual number of people really coming to the gym from the third month onwards.
Resolutions are inherently flawed as they are set on the premise that you cannot break them and the minute they are broken, people tend to think that they cannot be fixed or mended resulting in disappointment with oneself, waiting for yet another year with another set of resolutions to conquer.
I stopped keeping resolutions many years back when I realized about this flaw. I believe that a ‘Theme’ based approach for the year is a more powerful way of achieving something because there is no concept of breaking it. You keep doing things and moving forward with a theme-based approach and every incremental gain is another step closer to your goal.
Let me explain by sharing with you all the Theme that I have chosen for myself for 2019. My theme for this year is ‘Value and Growth’. So, everything that I do should help me in delivering Value or Growth.
Now it is important to elaborate further on what I want to do to stay true to this theme:
1. Increase my own value intellectually, financially and emotionally: As you can see, through this single statement, I can push my boundaries on my knowledge, my reading, my relationships and my investments.
2. Give value to people through knowledge, content and charity: It is not only about the value that I seek for myself but the value that I give out to others and there are various ways to do it. I can give my professional knowledge to my juniors and people I know or work with, I can share content on social media and digital platforms to known and unknown people which they find valuable, and I can give value back to society through financial support or any other kind of support to people who need it and do not have the means.
3. Growth for self, for others and for the organisation that I work for: I can grow significantly and also be the catalyst of growth for others – people and companies by following points 1 and 2 consistently throughout the year.
Now as you can see, everything that I do or achieve will only help me in staying true to my theme and by the end of the year, I will only feel nice about the distance I have travelled rather than feeling miserable about a resolution that I broke.
So, what will your theme for the year going to be?