2020 is just around the corner and soon many people will be making New Year’s resolutions. Many such resolutions don’t make it past February. If you are thinking about making a New Year’s resolution, you might like to improve your odds of success.
So it’s a few weeks early to be thinking about and talking about resolutions, right? Well, not really. To maximize your chances of having the resolution “stick,” you need to have some time to truly consider it. I wanted to get this in front of you before Christmas arrives because then it’s just days away from January 1st. My hope is that this way you have time to think over your possible resolutions. Is this something you want to commit to? What are your reasons for wanting to do this? And that’s where this week’s topic comes in: the values sort.
Grab your values set and cut out all 100 of those little pieces of paper. You are going to work your way through the 100 values until you’ve whittled it down to your top 5 values. I’m going to warn you right now: this is really hard! You’re going to see lots of values that resonate with you and which you hold. But you have to be ruthless and work down to a mere handful. You may do this by making repeated passes through the cards. Perhaps after going through it the first time, you have a stack of 40 values. Then go through those again and remove the values which aren’t super important to you. Perhaps now you have 25. Repeat the process. It’ll get harder each time you have a smaller pile of values cards but, eventually, you’ll have it down to your top 5 (or maybe 7). These are your absolute most important values. Are these guiding your life? When you make your resolutions in January, make them with your highest values in mind and you will boost your chances of successfully accomplishing your New Year’s resolutions. Those values can motivate you to continue to work on your resolutions even when you don’t really feel like it.
