It’s no secret that the most successful people in the world create lists of goals, have very clear mental pictures of their goals and hold positive self-dialogue about how they will make their goals happen. We can all benefit from using these techniques!

I encourage everybody to have a powerful list of resolutions this year. I believe your resolutions are much more likely to come to reality if you follow these simple steps for setting them and take daily actions to keep them at the front of your mind.

New Years’ resolutions are rarely taken seriously, which is a shame because the turning of a new year is a powerful trigger for making life-changing moves, genuine business success and increasing personal wealth. Most people would be lucky to even write their New Year’s resolutions down, let alone look at them again.

I challenge you to give this a try for 2015. You won’t be disappointed if you stick with it consistently.

Step 1 | Write a New Year’s resolution list and put it somewhere where you can see it daily

Try to limit the list to a maximum of 10 things you would like to achieve this year and include a mix of different goals such as financial goals, relationship goals, personal development goals and charitable goals etc.

Step 2 | Add specific targets to your New Year’s resolutions

A New Year’s resolution without a specific target is useless, you won’t know whether your really achieve it or not.

Beside each of your New Year’s resolutions write a specific target and make it time bound. For example:

1. Rather than “I want to lose weight,” you could write “I will weight 65kg (10 kilograms lighter) by the end of the year.”
2. Rather than “To build my business,” you could write “I will turnover $1.5 million this year.”
3. Rather than “To increase my wealth,” you could write “By the end of this year I will have added a $40,000 share portfolio to my assets.”

Step 3 | Daily visualisations

I may be an accountant with my foundations deeply entrenched in the power of facts and figures but I can’t talk highly enough about the power of visualisation. As mentioned above the daily habits of successful people generally include the use of visualisations. I urge you to add this step into your daily habits to help bring your New Year’s resolutions into fruition.

Take your list of New Year’s resolutions and create a visual picture of what your life, self, bank account, etc. will look like when you achieve your New Year’s resolutions.

So using the three examples above, your daily visualisation examples could be:

1. Visualising yourself at your goal weight, wearing your favourite outfit to a special event, feeling fit, healthy and comfortable.
2. Visualise yourself throwing a Christmas party for your staff for having helped you reach your goal of $1.5million turnover for the year.
3. Visualise rewarding yourself with a great holiday for reaching your goal of adding $40,000 to your share portfolio and picture yourself enjoying a cocktail by the pool at that beautiful resort that you’ve always dreams about.

To get the most out of your visualisations, spend 10 minutes in the morning and 10 minutes in the evening to run through all of your fantastic visions.

You might like to have actual pictures that inspire you, but also make sure you close your eyes and imagine yourself in the images with your minds-eye.

Step 4 | Affirmations

Again, I’m pretty sure most people would not expect an accountant to be telling you to take up affirmations, but again, a common tool of many successful business and sports people are affirmations.

To make your resolutions real, use affirmations on a daily basis and have around three affirmations for reach resolution. Similarly to the visualisations, focus on achieving your resolutions and strengthen the visual images with self dialogue. I’d suggest running through your affirmations at the same time you do your visualisations. The affirmations should take you no longer than 5 minutes at the most.

Using our example New Year’s resolutions, your affirmations could be:

• For reaching your goal weight:
  • I love being active;
  • I love going to the gym;
  • I love eating healthy foods.
• For reaching $1.5k turnover:
  • I love generating sales;
  • I love motivating and supporting my staff;
  • I love exceeding my clients’ expectations.
• For adding a $40k portfolio to assets:
  • I love increasing my income;
  • I love investing my money;
  • I love being frugal.

I encourage you to put these steps in action ASAP. Next month we will be taking this a step further and linking these concepts to business financial planning and forecasting.

Want to create some accountability? Why not share your New Year’s resolutions with us in the comments below or email them to us. We will check in with you at the end of the year to see how you went.