Part of the reason is that New Years’ Resolutions encourage a narrow focus on a goal without a plan to achieve that goal. While it’s possible to achieve something by ‘dumb luck’, most of the time, that isn’t how the world works. We need more than a goal but a roadmap for getting there.

If you were planning a road trip from New York to Miami, you wouldn’t just set off from Manhattan and drive south hoping for the best because that approach introduces all sorts of potential problems. Without planning such a journey, you could easily find yourself fifty miles from anywhere without food, water, or fuel. You’d also likely find the trip incredibly dull because you wouldn’t have established any milestones to afford you a sense of accomplishment along the way.

When most of us adopt a New Years’ Resolution, that’s effectively what we’re doing; setting a destination but making no plan for how we get there. Without a roadmap, the best we can do is try to ‘wing it’, which rarely results in success. Such resolutions also lack specifics, such as a deadline; even if we set a deadline, it becomes too easy for us to keep shifting it further away.

Ultimately, our New Years’ Resolutions lack accountability. It’s easy to tell yourself you’re going to do something, but it’s even easier to come up with a hundred reasons not to do it and to make excuses for ourselves.

Let’s imagine, for example, that you set a goal of reading twelve novels by the end of the year at a pace of one novel a month. By the end of January, you’ve read a couple of chapters. You can tell yourself that’s fine; you were busier than expected and didn’t have the time, so you’ll catch up in February. Once February is finished, and you’re even further behind your goal, you’ll just tell yourself the same thing again until, eventually, you’ll reach a point where the goal seems unobtainable. Still, it doesn’t really matter because you’re only accountable to yourself, so you can make an extra effort next year instead.

When it comes to a simple thing like reading more, it doesn’t particularly matter whether you reach the goal or not. However, some people set career goals. How many times have we said, “This year will be my year!” and by the end of the year, it wasn’t really your year? On December 31^st, you’re still in the same position you were on January 1^st. We can, and we do, make the same excuses: ‘I was busier than I expected’, ‘I didn’t have the time’, ‘Things didn’t click for me’, ‘I’ll do it next year’.

Once again, that early burst of determination and excitement hits the wall of reality, and because you’ve not planned ahead, you haven’t got a ladder to help you get over it. Similarly, because you’re not accountable to anybody else, you can reason yourself into acceptance of the situation even if, deep down, you know that you’re missing out on something that could improve your life, well-being, and happiness considerably.

Those effective and permanent beneficial changes to your career path are rarely a case of saying, ‘I’m going to do X’ and then just doing it. To overcome this cycle of ambition giving way to acceptance, you might want to consider investing in yourself by investing in individual coaching services that will not only provide encouragement and support but help you with drawing up a roadmap for achieving your goals. Importantly, a coach offers accountability. You’ll have somebody there for each step of your journey to question and challenge you positively so that you can’t simply brush off each setback with a comforting but defeatist line.

If you’ve noticed that you struggle to find the ladder to help you get over the various obstacles life throws at you, and you’re tired of simply settling then consider contacting us, or visiting robinlinescoaching.com to see whether we might be able to offer some vital assistance along your career path.

Don’t feel the need to settle when a simple investment in yourself today can reap huge rewards in the coming years.

The post New Years’ Resolutions: Planning Ahead for Success appeared first on Robin Lines Associates.

If you trawl through the Amazon Kindle book store, you’ll see any number of business guidebooks. These books focus on a lot of the areas that our business offers. You could also do a Google search and find any number of websites providing information on boosting sales or better management techniques. You may then ask yourself, why would a bespoke solution be better for you overall this collective knowledge?
 

We’re Not Generic

We’ve worked with businesses from Kiddimoto to Microsoft. We understand that all businesses are different. While the long-term goals and ambitions for success and profit remain consistent between one company and another, the techniques to achieve those goals differ quite substantially.

The collective wisdom contained online and in books is not without value, and it would be arrogant to suggest otherwise. However, they’re written not understanding your specific business because they have to speak to as wide a variety of businesses and individuals as possible.

Imagine a pet store and a computer software developer. Both businesses exist to succeed but both will have different target markets, and both will have different challenges within those markets. The two businesses cannot sell their products and services in the same manner, nor will their leadership be required to respond to the same variables in the marketplace. They are different businesses and they need to be respected as such.

In the real world, we can see examples of where businesses have struggled because they have not considered their uniqueness and they have attempted to apply business logic that succeeds in one area to a completely different one.

Take Aston Villa Football Club, for example. Over the past few years, Aston Villa has appointed marketing managers and financial directors to the most important positions on their board. These people have succeeded in their tasks in other business environments, but they have not succeeded at Aston Villa. Why? Because they don’t understand the business and the challenges it faces.

Only now, with relegation staring them in the face, have Aston Villa decided to appoint people who understand football to their board. Meanwhile, across the Midlands, Leicester City Football Club devised a strategy that works. Their board is a mixture of football people and businessmen, and as a result, they’ve built a potentially Premier League winning team.

Of course, Aston Villa could have done that. They’re the fifth most successful club in English football, but they haven’t done that because they have attempted to apply techniques from one business area to a completely different one.
 

Understanding

You’ll notice that we often mention understanding your business, and that is what we do. When we meet with you, we take the time to learn what it is you do, what it is you want to do, and the challenges you face. Our goal is to build upon the foundations you’ve established and construct a viable solution that will reward your efforts over the long-term.

Our blog contains some information that we find to be true in most cases but there is always more to learn, more to consider and more to adapt to. This is why our solutions are fully bespoke. We look at every aspect of your business, right down to the people who work there, and we tailor our solution to you. The presentations we create are unique to you. The lectures we give are unique to you. There is no recycling of information and we wouldn’t dare peddle a solution that worked for a software developer to a pet store.

We want you to be successful. We want you to see a tangible return on investment when you appoint us to assist with your business. We want you to be happy, to learn, to grow and to progress. This will not happen for us if we don’t treat you and your business with the respect it deserves as a unique entity.

For over thirty years this is what we have done. This is what we will continue to do. We’ve built long-term relationships with businesses small to large because of our specialisms and our dedication to helping your business exceed all of its expectations.

The post Why Bespoke Business Solutions? appeared first on Robin Lines Associates.