Ah yes, it’s a new year. And with each new year comes the promise of new excitement, new projects, and new adventures. 2013 comes with

Photo Credit: El coleccionista de instantes

the opportunity for you to achieve greatness.

I’ll tell you one thing, though. 2013 isn’t going to be great because of awesome New Year’s resolutions. No, sir. It’s only going to be awesome if you decide to make it awesome. I have a pretty big bone to pick with the resolutions. Not the idea of it, but the implementation.

Today, I’ll offer an alternative to your run-of-the-mill approach to New Year’s resolutions, and how you can put it into practice for the benefit of your engineering career.

Why Resolutions Are Problematic

What bugs me so much about New Year’s Resolutions is that they don’t work. Have you ever noticed how busy your local gym is during the month of January? It’s packed – full to the brim with people who resolved to lose weight, get fit, et cetera. And how about that same gym during February and March? Not so packed. Guaranteed. For some reason, New Year’s Resolutions have very weak staying power. What’s up with that?

My theory is that resolutions fail because making a resolution is only the first step towards making change. Resolving to do something is a lot like setting a vision for yourself. Setting a vision is an important step towards creating change. It’s critical, but it’s not enough. Imagine, if you will, a CEO addressing shareholders and announcing “We’re going to be the number one widget provider in North America!” The shareholders are excited. They know that being the number one widget maker on the continent would mean big bucks. “But Madam CEO,” they ask, “how will you achieve this?”. The CEO responds “We’re going to try very hard and hope that that works.”

Can you say ‘Corporate bailout’?

So, it’s obvious that you need more than a vision in order to elicit real change in yourself. What more might you need?

A Handy Guide to Real Change

For your convenience, here’s the Engineering and Leadership-approved guide to actual change in your life, and career. This is the step-by-step approach that will turn your resolution into a personal revolution.

1. Set your vision, or in other words, resolve to to something. This can be anything you want to see in your life or career. Maybe you want to be slimmer. Maybe you want the next big promotion. Whatever it is, write it down.
2. Turn your vision into a goal. A vision is typically something that’s open and broad. Goals are concrete and specific. Your goal has to fit the “SMART” criteria (Specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound) to make sure they’re workable. Again, write this all down.
3. Break your main goal into smaller milestones. In other words, turn your meal into bite-sized chunks. Eating a whole mean in one bite leads to heartburn, and probably choking. Bad times. You need short little “sprints” towards your main goal. This improves achievability and gives you the feeling like you’re making good progress. Again, write this all down.
4. Using your milestones as a guide, create an action plan. What are you going to do in order to meet those milestones? You need to take action on a regular basis, daily if possible, in order to build momentum and develop a habit.
5. Act! You need to actually do what you said you would in step 4 ;-)
6. Measure, correct, and re-evaluate. This step is all about taking stock of what you’ve done towards your goals and deciding whether you’re making satisfactory progress. If yes, then yahoo! Good job.If no, figure out what the problem is and correct it. This should be done regularly as well to make sure you stay on top of it.

What About You?

What are your New Year’s resolutions? How are you going to turn those resolutions into real action? Tell me all about it in the comment section below!