My three words for 2012!

Every year, people around the world make the terrible decision to set inhibitory New Year’s resolutions for themselves. They often times revolve around giving something up. Stop smoking, lose weight, or get out of debt. The thing is that the majority of people out there already break their resolutions come February because they set an unobtainable goal for themselves. Besides that, if you wanted to become the best person you could possibly be and you knew you needed to do a specific thing to achieve it, why would you wait until the beginning of the year to start? Why not June 30th? 

Having being one of these said people, who never live up to prescribed resolutions, this year I am concentrating instead on three words which sum up my motivation for recovery and self development in 2012. 

My three words for 2012 are ALIGNMENT, CONNECTION and IMPLEMENTATION 

I looked for three words that would help frame my challenges and opportunities for 2012. I didn't just think about where I am at this exact moment. For example, I don’t have the greatest job, but setting a goal in 2012 to get a better job might not be very useful. Once I’ve got the job, then what? Instead, I thought about setting the goal of “Alignment,” where I ask myself, “does this fit with everything else I intend for myself in this year?” Alignment also stands for balancing my health and lifestyle. I want to re-align my body back into its full health. 

The three words idea is built so that you can have something to reflect upon. As you know, goals should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely). The way you use the two together is that you think up goals that will match up to your words. For instance, my second word is ‘connection’. This relates to lots of areas of my life, such as building a better relationship with my mother, and also reconnecting with old friends and also building new connections with new friends. Also connecting with myself and growing in my personal development by forging new synaptic connections in my brain with all the new habits I will learn. 

Therefore the goals around this word are to spend one full day a month with my mother, text/phone/facebook/email my old friends and suggest meeting up, and really attain and focus to changing my destructive behaviors by practicing DBT skills every day. These goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. 

What will your 3 words be? How do you choose? 

Pick three words that help you the way a lighthouse helps a ship in a storm. Give yourself a word that guides you towards a powerful new opportunity, and that keeps you focused on what comes of this year. Use these words as starting points for tangible goals, SMART goals that can be measured and have dates to accomplish tasks by. These words sit above the actual goals, and set your guiding principles in place. 

Finally, all ideas are worthless without implementation. There is no shortage for projects and ideas out there. Big or small, none of them will get off the ground and see the light of day without proper execution and follow-through. So my final word is implementation. State what you are going to do and then do it. 

What 3 words or phrases best describe what you want to accomplish this year? Write them down on your whiteboard or somewhere else you can see them every day and use them to guide you to success in 2012!