With February coming to an end its likely that you have not yet implemented your New Year’s resolutions yet. If this is true for you, stop thinking negatively about your procrastination and accept that you have not done anything productive, move forward and start fresh. The following are a collection of powerful tips for successfully implementing your resolutions this year, as well as becoming a Successful Professional from Dan W. Bobst.
- Write down your goals. Physically write them down, on paper, in an old school notebook. Then share your goals with others. Writing your goals down suddenly makes them real. When you tell others about your goal, you are even more likely to be committed as others will be tracking your progress with you.
- Stop pursuing short-term wants that distract you from your goals. Stop the week night partying, and events that distract you from being a success. While you think you get away with it, others will notice you sneaking in later or nodding off in the afternoon.
- Take a digital time-out and read nonfiction books. Try to learn as much as you can about your profession and industry. You won’t gain any benefit from spending an evening arguing online, or looking at the highlight reals of everyone’s life on Facebook or Instagram.
- Have a set family dinner with your spouse and children. Use this time to have significant conversations about their lives, concerns and interest. Before you know it, children will out of the house and you’ll learn to late that you don’t know them. Committing this time each day will create a solid home-life that will give you support and motivation throughout your life.
- Give up working for the sake of working. Start focusing on being productive. Staying busy is not a measure of success. Take the time to step back and analyze your activities, and if they are not productive, move onto something else that will help improve your career.
- Focus on your health. If you are not physically healthy, everything in life becomes more difficult. Take the time to visit your doctor for annual check-ups and other needs. Find an exercise outlet to keep you active — hiking, yoga, swimming, biking or participate in competitive sports.
- Surround yourself with people that are from different backgrounds and will challenge you. Engage in hobbies where you can interact with people of all religions, economic levels, races and ages. Take the time to step outside of daily routine and widen your network.
- Take time to focus on your appearance and speech. People judge you based on how you present yourself and how you speak, both personally and professionally.
- Take time to de-stress. Spend time with friends and family, sign up for continuing education classes, start a new hobby or adopt a pet. These are all great ways to alleviate stress from the rough days at work.
- Having a basic grasps of recent sporting events, pop culture references, learning a few jokes or having a few personal anecdotes are great ways to break the ice and start a conversation. These can be used during interviews, meetings or as an opening to speak with strangers at networking events.
- Don’t let your job define you as a person. Eventually you may have to step away from your career and be left with no identity. This can make bouncing back and finding something new even more challenging.
- Constantly talking about where you went to college, your fancy neighborhood, exotic vacations and expensive cars won’t impress anyone, and can even make them dislike you for being pretentious.
- Put as much time as possible working in your early career, so you can reap the benefits in you later career and life.
- Establish a value for your time, delegate everything you can, including chores around the house that are not worth your time.
- Strive to be the person you want to be, all the time.
- Remove negativity and defeatist sentiments from your vocabulary. “I guess the rich just get richer,” “We’ve always done it this way”, “That will never work” and similar statements should be removed from your conversations. Focus on a positive attitude!