Monday Morning Mojo – My New Year’s Commitments!!

By Tom Tognoli, COO & Founder, Intero Real Estate Services, Inc

Today marks the first full week of a New Year and the day that most of us roll up our sleeves and get back to work and school. It is our opportunity for a fresh start on whatever it is that we want to accomplish in our F5 (Faith-Family-Friends-Fitness-Finance). We all just need to remember that it is the beginning and not the end. We need to pace ourselves or we will crash and burn. Don’t let what happened to your last year’s resolutions happen again this year.

I think it starts first with not making resolutions. I am not a big fan of resolutions because they never seem to stick and most of the time they are these big pie in the sky things…they are hopes and prayers. It is why our resolutions are typically the same each year. Try something different this year…make commitments not resolutions. A commitment is just that…it’s not negotiable. I would rather see people make smaller commitments they know they can keep than making big audacious resolutions that very rarely if ever stick/work.

We all have big goals and visions of things we want to accomplish in our F5, but remember, if they are really worthy doing they’re probably not going to get done in a day, in a week, or in a month. If we could get them accomplished quickly we would have already done them. Typically the goals and visions for what we want to change/accomplish in our F5 are life changes we need to make. They are not day changes, week changes, month changes or even year changes. There are no “crash diet” solutions to accomplish our goals and visions.

We need to look at the steps necessary to accomplish our goals like a marathon. We cannot just wake up one day after not running our entire life (or for years) and expect that we are going to knock out running 26.2 miles. But, if we start small, perhaps with something as easy as a 1 mile walk and build on it, anyone can do it.  It’s about committing ourselves to something we know we can maintain and then building on it.  It’s not about choosing something that will bury us. It is also important that we set “mini goals” with timelines associated to them so we are experiencing success/winning along the way.  If we don’t we will become frustrated and overwhelmed. As we accomplish each of these “mini goals,” set new ones and then reset your commitments by making them a bit bigger.

Using the metaphor of running a marathon – start with lightly jogging or walking one mile every day and after a month build that to lightly jogging 3 miles a day. Then over the next few months build it to lightly jogging 5 miles, then 7 miles, then 10 miles, then… Before you know it, if you are committed, you will be ready to run that 26.2 mile marathon. You will accomplish whatever your Big Audacious Goal is. The coolest thing is once you have that under your build, can you imagine what next year’s goals are going to look like…talk about big and audacious.

Commit!!!!!!