Why can't I achieve my life goals?

Do you start every year with your newly minted new year's resolution? 

With all the resolve you can muster, you commit to losing weight, getting your finances straight, redoing the kitchen, get a new job, stop smoking, stop drinking, save more money, learn a new language, you name it.

Until you start realizing that you never actually achieve that resolution and you finally give up.  And you become one of those people who "doesn't do resolutions."

We all have great intentions but boy is it hard to follow through.  If we only had more will-power! 

But is it really that you don't have will power?  Most of us get up every day and go to work. There are consequences to not going to work including homelessness and starvation.  Most of us take care of our families, our friends, go to church, clean the house, etc.  We don't lack will power to get the essentials done. Even when we absolutely don't want to do things, we find the will power to get going.

But we know that some programs do work.  We know that people can be successful with weight loss or reducing debt, etc. Some people seem to have some kind of individual will power that the rest of us envy.  But really what they do is prioritize these goals and keep themselves accountable.  Sometimes they have someone else who keeps them accountable - ala, Weight Watchers and Alcoholics Anonymous. 

So I was thinking… what if we have a program that helps with both of those?  I use techniques at work that help teams prioritize the most important work and keep each other accountable to deliver on their work goals.  They harness the power of working as a tight team of peers to focus and commit to their goals together and then deliver as a unit.  If one fails, they all fail.  And they succeed as a team.

Why can't we do that with personal goals? I think we can!!!!

I am kicking off a new program that helps with goal-setting, prioritization, and accountability and uses rituals and practices to help us habitualize the behaviors we need to actually achieve our goals.

I find that the one thing that helps those of us who struggle to create good habits or work on our goals is accountability.  That's why good athletes have coaches and it's why those programs I mentioned above work.  It's why fitness gurus recommend getting a buddy to work out with or diet with. 

Online programs abound on goal-setting training and techniques for creating a plan.  But I want a program that helps you stay accountable to a peer group that you commit to regularly doing the required work to reach your goals.

The Pilot

Our pilot starts this week with a lovely group of ladies, all focused on starting or growing a business.  The businesses are all different but the focus is the same - what do we need to do to kick off our businesses or reboot/grow an existing business?

We'll visualize and brainstorm together, set goals, prioritize, break down the work into achievable chunks and then plan our small tasks and report back to each other on our progress.

The key is regular check-ins to share with the team our progress. Through those check-ins we'll also share insights, learnings and feedback that might help each other out.  So in addition to accountability, we'll have the benefit of peer feedback on our ideas.  That's something you can't get when you work alone on your goals.

Stay tuned. 

Read my next post about the pilot: The Power of the Kick Start