3 Steps to Fulfilling Your New Year’s Resolution
It’s that time of year again. You made your resolutions for a new year. You might have even made it to the gym already (once?). But you haven’t even begun to fathom how you can make good on the biggest, most existential resolutions. The good news: there’s a stepwise way to make your new year’s resolution, a new year reality.
More than 25 years ago, I made a very big resolution: To change my career. At the time, I was a CPA working as an auditor for Ernst & Young. And even though I was OK at my job, I’d come home from work each day and wonder: “Is that what I’m going to be doing for the rest of my life?” When I complained to my friends and family, they always said the same thing “you’re not supposed to love your job…it’s work.” But I wanted more. And I knew hope isn’t a strategy. And wishing isn’t a plan. So right there and then, I started to build a plan to make my resolution a reality.
Here’s what I did:
Step 1: Self Assessment
I started with a set of 4 introspective questions and mapped my answers in a 4 box grid (see below):
What am I NOT good at, but enjoy doing.
What am I NOT good at, and don’t enjoy doing.
What was I good at, and don’t enjoy doing.
What was I good at, AND thoroughly enjoyed doing.
This process helped me to systematically uncover my personal and professional preferences — which for me, centered around creativity and storytelling. It also helped me to be very clear that I didn’t thrive in an overly structured and hierarchical environment like public accounting.
And while this sounds simple, it was the simplicity and clarity of this exercise that drove home what I knew but never openly acknowledged.
Step 2: Idea networking
Idea networking is systematically inventorying your contacts in your “extended” personal network and setting up in-person and phone conversations with those people. Not everyone is going to say “Yes”. But some will. My experience was that several people took a sincere interest and gave valuable advice and even went as far as to connect me with additional people they thought could help. What helped me in these meetings was to prepare a background statement on WHY we were meeting and to ask a series of pointed questions that tapped into their personal and professional experience. By the end of the conversation, I often found that they were helping me to nurture some of the raw, unshaped hunches I had about my career interest. After this round of meetings, I had a much clearer idea of what I wanted to focus on and had formulated a positioning and a plan of how I could win a job in marketing and innovation. (which is what I landed on as my ‘ideal’ career)
Step 3: Go out and Pitch yourself.
I started by building my 1 minute story of why a CPA is exactly what you need in your next marketer. And while I thought I had a good pitch, it was often met with rejection, or even worse, silence. The hard truth you are going to face is that it’s not easy to be rejected repeatedly. It stings. And it makes you question if you’re on the right path. But the trick is to sincerely look at each rejection as a learning opportunity and not give up.
Remember: Everybody got’s knocked down. But the real test of a person is your willingness to get back in the ring.
For me personally, it took more than 25 tries before one amazing person, a thoughtful executive named Charlotte Sibley, listened to my pitch and said, “Why not? Let’s give you a chance.” That was more than 20 years ago.
I would say that I’ve never looked back. But that wouldn’t be true. I always look back. I always remind myself that it takes courage to do things that are hard. It’s easy to be a success story when opportunities fall in your lap. But the truth is, it’s the bruises and scars that remind you of your journey and your success and will continue to motivate you to be a better version of yourself. So always look back.
Last thought. When I first imagined my work life, I figured it would be shaped like a line. Or in other words, life would unfold in a linear way. This happens. Then that happens. And so on. But life isn’t a line. It’s more of a squiggle. Things don’t naturally happen in a logical or systematic way. It’s up to us to be deliberate and impose order and intention. And it’s up to us to decide when and how to live and pivot our lives.
So if you aren’t living your best life, start with a bold resolution and then systematically go about making it come to life. Life’s too short to wait and wish for change to happen.
