Achieve Your Goals and Resolutions By Applying The Acronym - APA!

Many people decide to make one or more New Year's Resolutions every year. However, some experts claim that approximately 90% of these people will fail to achieve their resolutions. Many will have given up by the end of January!

They will stay overweight or smokers or in debt for the rest of the year and possibly for the rest of their lives. Another group of people will remember past failures and not even bother to make any resolutions. They will wait for someone else to make things happen in their lives.

However, some people do keep their resolutions. Why do some people fail and others succeed and, more importantly, how can you and I succeed? The following three suggestions might help you both at the start of the New Year and whenever you decide to make a resolution or set a goal you wish to achieve.

A first key step to success is to take immediate action to achieve your goal whether you have made a resolution to do so or not. One reason for failure is that making resolutions for the future can become an excuse for not taking action now.

People often fail to realize that, if they can't take action today, they will be even less likely to take action tomorrow. Promised action in the future soothes current guilt and postpones the necessary action to an uncertain future.

Making resolutions, then, can become a substitute for action. It can become another way of procrastinating. Patric Chan makes the above point well. He suggests a solution:

"If you want to be successful or make a change, the time's now. Decide today. Take action. Not plan to take action next month. If planning's part of your action, then plan. But if planning is a separate part of your supposed actions, then you're going to repeat a history of no-result."

Is planning a part of your action or not? I think it should be since brain work is just as important as body work in achieving many goals. "Fail to plan and you plan to fail" is quoted frequently.

A deadline can help greatly in making planning part of action. The deadline of Christmas day means that those shopping plans or lists have to be put into action or major disappointment will result. You will have to have wrapped those parcels before the guests arrive or find an alternative.

My sister's current method of meeting Christmas deadlines is to hand out presents in the shopping bags that were given out when they were bought. This saves a lot of time and paper both for the giver and the recipient! She insists that "the bag, if it is a nice bag, is as nice as the paper! The stress should be on time and energy and not on the paper!"

Planning the steps by which we will carry out our New Year Resolutions in time for a clear deadline is a second important step on the road to successfully achieving them.

All the talk about New Year's resolutions in December and January can help in creating a decent plan with a clear goal and the steps to achieve it. Make the plan while everyone is talking about their plans and you will have made progress right at the start of the year.

Make use of the optimism that surrounds a fresh start and a new year and strike while the iron is hot in the first few days of January.

Some goals, of course, need no plans. You don't need to make a plan to take out the rubbish or to clean your teeth. You don't need a plan to carry out daily habits like going for a walk or doing a hundred sit ups.

On the other hand, you might need to plan when you can find time to go for a walk or do those sit ups. Walking needs to be listed as a priority since other activities will soon crowd in to prevent it. Sit ups can be done first thing in the morning but can be difficult if you have a hangover!

Some plans can be very simple. A great Japanese marathon runner had a simple plan to achieve success. His plan was to run in the morning and then again in the evening. The plan worked well. He won the Boston Marathon.

A great American athlete had an equally simple plan. He trained when he felt like it and when he didn't. He successfully achieved an Olympic gold medal.

A soldier did push ups all day long for three months in order to get back in shape to meet his wife who remembered him as slim and fit! He met all her expectations!

My daily ongoing flexible plan, using the acronym SOG, is to achieve three things every day:

To spend an hour or more learning a useful skill like copywriting or html.

To work for an hour or more on an overwhelming task that needs daily attention like replying to emails and off line post.

To spend an hour or more working on my current most important goal like writing this article.

As you can see SOG stands for Skill, Overwhelming task and Goal. These items can be performed in any order. Today I have started with G and will end with OS - GOS! You might of course prefer OGS!

However, "the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley". Even a good and simple plan is not enough to achieve success on its own.

You could lose your drive - your ability to move forward in a determined way to fulfill your plans. This can happen soon or after months and years of trying.

You can lose that red hot desire for a better life and decide that you are better off as you are. You can lose the energy necessary for achieving more than you have so far.

Other people can fall ill and take up all your time and energy in looking after them. Other people can fail to keep their promises of support. Other people can mislead and con you out of the money needed to carry out your plans!

Eventually you may give up on your promises and commitments to your goals, dreams and plans.

You will, then, need to take a third step to success. You will need to unleash the power of your subconscious mind. Use the power of your subconscious mind by repeating or listening daily to affirmations like: "Money comes to me abundantly from all directions."

You could systematically visualize your goals and resolutions as if they have already been achieved. See yourself looking slimmer and moving swiftly and with agility. Do this before sleeping, after waking up and after exercise when you are in a relaxed state of mind.

Listen to hypnosis tapes which can help you quit smoking etc. Study the law of attraction and give it a try. The law of attraction states that you attract to yourself what you think about most.

To achieve your New Year Resolutions or any Resolutions try applying the following three steps for at least a month.

Act on your resolutions now whether you have a plan or not.

Plan or list the steps you will take to achieve your resolutions.

Affirm that you already have what you want.

If you find acronyms helpful, remember the acronym APA - Act, Plan, Affirm - and apply it daily.

Have a great New Year!

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Succeed by Starting Instead of Procrastinating - Five Steps and an Acronym to Help You Start

"You don't have to be great to get started, but you have to get started to be great." Les Brown

What a brilliant quote from Les Brown! We all need to appreciate the fact that we don't have to be great before we can make a start on becoming great.

Your first cooked meal might taste atrocious but starting on the road to skillful cooking could eventually lead you on to be a culinary blessing to your family and friends!

Every one looks forward to my brother's meals! My first meal ended up buried on the outskirts of the scout camp where I had attempted it! We had fried sausages instead and my cooking skills are still severely limited. But every day, I have the opportunity, at least, to become more like my brother

You could take your first martial arts lesson today. You will have started on the path to black belt and beyond. You could end up saving lives! At least 20 of my students have saved themselves from injury and possibly death.

You could start leaning 'html' right now even if you are not sure what the word means. Eventually you could learn how to 'mine gold' on the internet and teach others how to fight their way out of poverty and recession.

Inspiring opportunities to achieve greatness are everywhere but starting on the road to achievement can be difficult.

Some people have made a start on this road with little time and little money. One writer lacked paper, space and time but still made a start with what he had.

The famous martial artist, Geoff Thompson, wrote his first book on a roll of toilet paper sitting in the factory rest room where he worked. He is now a well known author and award winning film maker.

You can get started by breaking any giant task down into small steps or even small pieces of toilet paper! Most people can just about manage to take one step at a time.

Wikipedia defines not starting or procrastination as: "A behavior which is characterized by deferment of actions or tasks to a later time." It has even been described as an illness.

How can we attempt to deal with a reluctance to start without visiting the psychiatrist first?

Something as simple as tidying your room can help. It is easy to put off any task if you know you will have to struggle to find the tools or papers you need to get going. If, on the other hand, your room is well organized, you will not be delayed by a frustrating search which can tempt you to give up before you start. Keep the tools you need within easy reach.

Robin Hall, the author of 'The Cartoonist's Workbook' wrote: "Try to keep the equipment you need to practise your cartoons as near at hand as possible. Sometimes the THOUGHT of having to get things ready is enough to make us switch on the telly."

The imagination is more powerful than the will. See yourself confidently writing that article or taking that action you have been putting off. Imagine yourself starting and finishing what you have begun. See yourself happily viewing the results of your actions. You will then be much more likely to begin.

Many years ago, the great Norman Vincent Peale realized the power of the imagination: "Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop the picture... Do not build up obstacles in your imagination."

Your mind can stop you starting by bombarding you with all kinds of worries and images of failure or embarrassment. Use this same mind and imagination to reverse that process by making the mental effort to visualize yourself doing what you have so far failed to do.

Perhaps the key step to getting started is to decide on what is most important in your life. Paul Graham suggests a useful guideline is to think about what you would like to appear in your obituary! "He or she did the shopping" is unlikely to cut it unless you did the shopping for an elderly neighbour.

Paul also points out correctly that working on one thing means procrastinating on other things like shaving and doing 'errands'. Some great people ignore mundane details in favor of greater ideas. My step brother has been known to leave his shoe laces fashionably undone. Instead he fills his mind with grander things like the history of the Visigoths in Spain!

Right now, writing this article is more important to me than reading my emails so I am working on it first thing. Ignoring some key emails might be the price I have to pay for writing the words you are, hopefully, still reading.

I started and finished this article by following much of the advice above. This advice could well help you to take action on starting your most important task today.

Firstly, appreciate the simple fact that anyone can make a start on the path to greatness. You don't need a certificate or permission to begin!

Secondly realize that others, like Geoff Thompson, have started and finished notable tasks in spite of difficult circumstances.

Thirdly, tidy your room or office so that it is easy to find the tools you need to get started. Don't allow frustrating searches to block your path to success! A tidy room can even generate a kind of energy of its own.

Fourthly, imagine yourself making a start. Feel the joy of finally making the kind of moves you have been putting off. Finally, you are doing what you knew you should be doing! Finally, you are seeing and feeling the results of your achievements!

Fifthly, focus relentlessly on what is important so that you can avoid the distractions which may choke your attempts to make a start on what matters most.

If you find acronyms helpful in remembering lists of things, you might find the acronym ACTIF useful in focusing on the five steps above i.e.

Anyone (can make a start right now)
Circumstances (can be overcome)
Tools (should be readily available)
Imagine (yourself finally getting started and succeeding)
Focus (on what is important) Procrastinate on the rest.

You can remember the acronym ACTIF by 'acting as if you are already successful'.

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