According to current research, at best only 30% of Corporate Change Initiatives succeed.
You’ve seen the stats… 80% of people quit their New Year’s resolutions by the 2nd week of February. Here’s what I use with my clients to stack the odds in their favor to achieve their goals and accomplish lasting change both personally & professionally.
Accomplish Your Goal Using These Four Practices:
Get clear on what you want to achieve in your professional or personal life
Identify what’s important to you about accomplishing this goal
Put in practices that support your goals vs depending on sheer will-power
Find an accountability partner
These four practices are proven ways to outsmart your brain's resistance to change the important things in your world that YOU want to impact.
Many people struggle with change…if it was easy to change, no one would set goals or make resolutions – they’d just do them! Take note, your personal world, very much like your professional world is set up to keep you exactly the same as you were yesterday. Your team doesn’t like it when you change and are hoping it’s just a phase that you’ll abandon after a few weeks. Surprisingly and disappointingly, family, friends, or significant others can get threatened when you announce a plan to improve yourself.
Because what you’re looking to improve upon takes extra effort, you want a plan to keep you successful when you’re tempted to slip into old habits. When I run my Blueprint for High Performing Leaders program, it involves Emotional Intelligence and Leadership Styles feedback, intense reflection on how they are being received as leaders, and they create a specific plan to become more effective as a leader. I warn them “When you go back to your organization, everything is set up for you to be exactly the way you were before you came to this program.” You must steel yourself from falling back on old habits that aren’t working and here’s how.
Put Guard Rails in Place
Put into place Goal Guard Rails for your new habits and actions that keep you on your path to success:
Be clear what your new habit or actions will be and WHY it matters to you
Tell your team and the important people in your life, what you’re up to and why, and find an accountability partner
Your accountability partners job is to ask you three questions;
1. What did you do that you promised to do?
2. What didn’t you do that you promised to do?
3. What will you do to make progress on your goals by the next time we speak?
Here’s an example: If you picked prioritizing your day according to important goals and blocking your calendar so you won’t be sidelined by the endless “got a minute” interruptions that can derail and burn your entire day. Let your team know “I’m trying something new to improve my effectiveness in getting us to achieve our goals sooner and with less stress. Other than a true emergency, the best way to connect with me outside of our regularly scheduled meetings (make sure you have these), is to check my calendar and send me or my assistant an e-mail with dates and times that could work for you. Let’s try this for a month and make adjustments until we get it right for all of us!”
Make sure to Put Everything in your calendar, like planning or project time. If you have empty blocks of time, people assume that open spot is free game and they’ll fill it with their agenda, which most often is NOT aligned with your goals
If it’s a personal goal – like improving certain relationships or eating healthy & being fit, link it to what’s important to you and create a system to support your goals
My Goal Guard Rails:
My husband and I have a young daughter and I stay fit and eat healthy so I can chase her around, snow ski and play basketball with her
I work with top leaders and their teams within Financial Services who are overseeing billions in assets. I also work with Key Partners in top Law Firms.
