Resolutions don’t need to be an all-or-nothing game. Every little advancement towards your long-term objective is a win.
Let’s say you resolve to be more successful at work. Your short-term goals are to communicate better with your boss, your team & at meetings.
Let’s say you discover that the way to be more successful is to focus on being concise. You start preparing a few messages in advance, removing filer words & redundancies.
Then suddenly, your workmates are attending to you and following your recommendations. (Whereas before, they just interrupted you and didn’t seem to care for your ideas.) Whoa! Being concise is a giant step towards being more successful at work!
“But, on the whole, tho’ I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was, by the endeavour, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it.” — Benjamin Franklin
When people are compelled by your ideas and follow your lead, you get promotions and a salary increase.
Nobody was born an incredible communicator, a charismatic influencer. They worked to get there. It’s the most important thing you can do for yourself.
Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t achieve your long-term objective of having executive presence or eliminating filler words from your speech. Master each action in the step-by-step process to achieving those long-term objectives.