Episode Details

The custom of making New Year's resolutions has been around for thousands of years, but it hasn't always looked the way it does today.

The ancient Babylonians held their new year's celebrations in mid-March when the crops were planted. They made promises to pay their debts or return items they borrowed.

These promises were the forerunners of our new year's resolutions.

Today, we're going to take about how to restore some of your New Year's resolutions that may have fallen by the wayside.

Where did my New Year's resolution go?

I bet you made some New' Year's resolutions.

Most of us did because resolve comes easily on December 31st.

But give it a few weeks and many of the resolutions you made might already be in disarray, compromised, abandoned.

And the resolute determination to make this year the year that you stick to your resolutions has probably forgotten altogether.

I'm not writing this to make you feel guilty over this abandonment.

Instead, it is about the real reasons resolutions and the determination to achieve them are lost, year after year, and how to change things so that this year you'll get on track to systematically set and achieve new goals.

So here are 9 strategies to rescue them

1. You can't achieve new goals or make desired changes without allocating time to do so.

One of the big reasons that resolutions never become reality is that no room is made for them in your daily schedule.

There are obviously some things you're going to need to keep doing, some new things you'll need to do and a bunch of things you'll have to stop doing to make room for the new more productive activities.

2. Priorities should govern schedule, schedule shouldn't govern priorities.

Another mistake made by the vast majority of business owners and entrepreneurs is they operate like workers instead of bosses and leaders.

To have a better year this year you'll have to wrest control away from others' priorities and be governed by your own priorities.

3. Resolutions aren't resolutions without resolve.

Only you can decide what really matters to you.

So don't bother making resolutions to appease or satisfy others.

Be honest with yourself – that's a prerequisite for success.

4. Resolutions require resources.

Almost anything you decide to do, any change you decide to make, any goal you set out to achieve requires new or different resources.

You aren't really serious about a resolution unless you invest in and gather the required resources.

Sometimes investment motivates follow-through, too since you've expended time effort and money in it.

5. Daily progress.

Take your goals, your objectives and break them down to a timeline and to-do list for each day, from now to fruition.

Here is the discipline that is guaranteed certain to move you closer to any goal each and every day: refuse to end any day without doing something, no matter how small, that moves you toward the goal!

6. Who motivates the motivator?

As a businessperson, as an entrepreneur, as the leader you may be doing a lot of motivating of others, but who motivates you?

Any professional sports coach will tell you: measurement automatically improves performance, and measurement monitored by someone else further improves performance.

7. Build up to change.

Say you resolve to get up an hour earlier every morning to work on some project. You could start with 15 minutes for two weeks, then 20 minutes for two weeks, then 30 for a month, then 45 for two weeks.

8. It's not too late to regroup!

You may already have let your resolutions slip away.

It doesn't matter. Today, tonight, tomorr