I’m not sure how long Chris Brogan has been doing his 3 words to focus on each year, but it is something that I have used in the past and liked it way more than any kind of resolution.
Why?
Because having points of focus is much better than having some arbitrary “resolution” to do something differently.
Let’s face it, saying I’m going to do something arbitrary like “lose weight” is a fast way to not achieve much of anything.
But if you say you are going to focus on:
- Family
- Health
- Value
That’s something you can ask yourself if you are achieving every day. And, if you aren’t…tomorrow is a great opportunity to start all over again.
That said, my 3 words for next year are:
Value: I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about how I am going to deliver value to my audience, my clients, and my prospects.
For far too long I was trapped in a mindset that took a self-destructive all or nothing, one size fits all or none approach.
In setting aside some time to think about things recently, I realized that I was severely limiting how I deliver value to the world.
So I’m going to do a lot better.
No doubt.
Discipline: I’ve been doing a lot of reading about positive psychology during the past few weeks.
Alan Weiss has written about the work of Martin Seligman in many of his books and the concept of positive psychology is one that just makes sense.
Here’s a simple way of describing it: you control the way you talk to yourself.
That means that when someone runs a stop sign in your neighborhood…which happens to me daily, it isn’t a personal thing, that person is just a jerk and isn’t focused on the fact that people live there…just that they are trying to get home.
So to invest too much emotional energy in the travails is not good for you.
Positive psychology is about that, not investing emotional energy in stupid stuff.
Which comes back to discipline.
In my study of positive psychology, I have found that all too often if you are trapped in a negative mindset, you lose the discipline you need.
So I am going to try to discipline myself to maintain a focus on controlling the way that I talk to myself and how I approach challenges.
Creativity: The key skill we all need to exercise in the coming year is creativity.
I made a new friend this year, Allen Gannett, and he has a book coming out about creativity. It is a learned skill.
But more importantly, as the world changes, we have to dismiss the idea that creativity is something that we are just lucky to be born with.
It is a skill that we can build and develop.
In fact, developing it is more important than ever.
Those are my three words, what are yours?