Happy New Year

I hope that everyone has had a wonderful Christmas season and I wish you all a very happy new year.

I've never been one for celebrating New Year's. I'm not sure why...I think it's because I'm not really sure what people are celebrating. It seems more a time to go and get drunk. I don't think that being wasted is a particularly good way to enter the new year. I think mostly is because I see the Spring as the new year. Oh I know that it's about the calendar but to me Spring is about new things. New leaves and flowers, things are turning green and colorful, animals are giving birth and coming out of hibernation, and there is new hope after the usual long and cold winter.

So has there been anyone who has been successful at completing their new year's resolutions? I like making the resolutions but I can't say that I have always accomplished the goals that I've set. So like every other year I am thinking about the things that I would like to work on in my life...the list seems longer than usual this year. This year I think I will be successful, I have new tools to use.

Crazy as this is I learned a lot about setting goals and achieving them while I was in Sri Lanka. It was part of the cirriculum of the Success and Ethics class that I taught. I was learning just as much as the students. So I thought that I would pass along a few pointers if you are deciding to set some new years goals for yourself.

The most important thing is to make goal statements. If you don't define your goals then you will get frustrated and discouraged. It helps to write the statements down. When you commit it to paper it's like a contract with yourself. To write a good goal statement you need to take it through 5 steps. The 5 steps are is the acronym S.M.A.R.T. (for those of you who have done your internship at CPC then you may remember this from Leadership and Administration class. it was covered there too.)

S - Specific. Your goal statement needs to be specific. It is very difficult to know what to do when your goal is vague.
M - Measurable. You need to be able to measure your goal in some way. How will you know whether or not you have achieved your goal otherwise?
A - Attractive. Do you desire to actually do this? Or is it something that others think that you should do?
R - Realistic. Is it a realistic goal? Too often we set our sites too high and we are not really able to achieve the goal that we have set.
T - Timable. You need to have a time limit by where you will have achieved your goal. If you don't set a time you can just keep postponing it.

So all you do is write down your goal and see if it fits all 5 of these steps. If it doesn't fit all of them change the statement until it does. .

So let's use this momentous time of year to make things happen. Happy resolution making.