While January 1st is “just another day” and 2020 is “just another year,” transitions and beginnings represent thresholds in our minds and lives to walk and grow through (as talked about in The Power of Moments, by Chip and Dan Health).
New Year’s Resolutions or concepts like the “One Word” exercise are by no means new. And we’ve all heard the statistics for how long they last on average and what percentage of people stick with it. The statistician says “only 8% make a sustainable change” and the idealist says “we just need 8% of the world to make a change over the next 12 years for everyone to have grown!”.
Regardless of your outlook on resolutions, the following are two exercises that have been helpful in wrapping my mind around and getting prepared for the year ahead, and will also help demonstrate practical leadership in 2020.
- What is a central piece of my identity that I want to inform my actions as a leader in the year ahead?
- While I have an identity statement that speaks to who I am and want to be as a person and leader, this question helps to narrow it down even further through the early parts of 2020.
- To get your mind spinning, here are two of the elements that jumped to the forefront for me personally:
- Foster a safe place for people to pursue the dangerous
- Kind Encourager
- What does a successful day look and feel like?
- At the end of the day, we all feel something. It was exciting, busy, draining, unproductive, hectic, stressful, etc. Those are all in some form “emotional reactions” to the day. While there’s a place for that and some days are best recapped as such, they’re not particularly helpful in informing how we plan to go about the future. At its core, what would it look like to have a list of values-based priorities set out to accomplish in the course of the day? The list below is what I came up with for what a successful day looks like for me in this current season. Including working out and spending intentional time with family, I suspect it’s about 3 hours of the day from morning to night.
- 10 dedicated minutes with my 3 (Lacey, Anneliese and Benjamin)
- Encourage someone
- Engage/thank/feedback with or from a customer
- Be accessible for our team’s escalations
- Take a step to attack one of my top 3 priorities internally for this quarter
- Journal
- Read 10 pages
- Workout
- At the end of the day, we all feel something. It was exciting, busy, draining, unproductive, hectic, stressful, etc. Those are all in some form “emotional reactions” to the day. While there’s a place for that and some days are best recapped as such, they’re not particularly helpful in informing how we plan to go about the future. At its core, what would it look like to have a list of values-based priorities set out to accomplish in the course of the day? The list below is what I came up with for what a successful day looks like for me in this current season. Including working out and spending intentional time with family, I suspect it’s about 3 hours of the day from morning to night.
While I am looking forward to giving this priority list a shot in the new year and decade, what is on your list? Write it down. Follow it. Cheers to creating new habits in 2020!
