2024 AND NEW EXPECTATIONS
Self-discipline is vital to achieving set goals, argues Ekpa Stanley Ekpa
To keep track of time, many societies around the world developed their calendars as a way to ensure certainty out of many uncertainties of human activities and transitions. Each society’s calendar is a reflection of their cultural and religious beliefs. At the beginning of each year, under any of the calendars – Julian, Hindu, Hijri/Islamic, Chinese, Buddhist, Japanese, or the Hebrew calendar, human beings set new behavourial standards to meet new expectations. If you find yourself setting lofty goals for the new year, you are not alone, there are billions of other people around the world doing the same thing at different time of the year.
Whatever resolve you make for the beginning of this calendar year, two things are involved – you either discipline yourself to succeed in achieving your lofty goals, or you fail to achieve your new year resolutions within the first few weeks of the year as majority of people do. What distinguishes the former from the latter is self-leadership – the process and practice of influencing and directing your own thoughts and actions to successfully achieve goals and situate a satisfying life. According to the Forbes Health/One Poll survey, the average resolution lasts just 3.74 months. Only 8% of respondents tend to stick to their goals for one month, while 22% last two-month, 13% last four months.
Leaning on yourself to lead yourself through the year requires effective self-leadership strategies, skills, disciplined commitments, self-regulation and accountability, recommitments and honesty on your personal preferences. Given that your internal beliefs, thoughts and perceptions are your biggest influence, your ability to guide yourself becomes the most important step to design, achieve and sustain your new year resolution goals. In setting your yearly goals, you must first consider yourself as an institution that should be organized with clear visions, setting smart goals, with motivation to stimulate the right commitments for success. Like corporate entities, achieving set goals comes with challenges and setbacks, perhaps, everyone needs to start the year with this reality in mind. How we respond to this reality is determined by the degree of our calmness – how we remain calm, clear-headed, and focused even in moments of difficult circumstances.
Of all the leadership skills you need in setting your new year resolutions, decision making is as important as the actions you take in actualizing the resolutions. To make informed, rational and actionable decision, you need to understand yourself, strength, weakness, character and competence. No matter how small the decision, you need information that will help you make fact-based decision on the nature, duration, responsibilities, possible challenges, results and impact of your resolution if followed through. This is even more important given the current socio-economic realties in Nigeria today – whereas you have little or no control over our nation’s economic fluctuations, you have a choice and control on your personal preferences, actions, inactions and adjustments to live a meaningful, happy and satisfying life in 2024.
Every leadership environment requires regulation, self-leadership is not an exception. If you cannot control yourself, you can hardly lead yourself effectively to achieve any set goal. To actualize your new year resolutions, you need to govern yourself in controlling your emotions and manage how you respond to external events. To ensure you don’t fall apart due to uncertainty, stress, anxiety and disappointments in achieving whatever goal you set for yourself this year, you need clarity that helps you to stretch beyond your own borders of emotion in order to reach accurate view of situations. Self-clarity affords you the opportunity to creatively come up with fresh ideas and new options when faced with great challenges.
Since no one can hardly succeed in isolation, we all need that little external push and support, but nothing will keep you forging forward than self-generated energy. Learning to motivate, energize and refill yourself is an essential skill for resilience, strength, courage and sustained commitment to achieving your set goals. In moments when you cannot motivate yourself, for such time will eventually come, try to envisage the future. Even in absence of required resources to drive your goals or maintain a habit, you must realize that there is no one-way traffic in the affairs of life – there is always an option out of any problem. You have a duty to find the strength and energy to propel through other options for the actualization of your goal.
When you set your goals for the year, you must have timeline, KPIs and a culture of taking responsibility for your actions and inactions without resorting to blame game. Leadership without accountability is simply an invitation to complacence. Without self-accountability, you can hardly meet the required efforts, obligations, tasks and commitments to achieving your goals. There are many ways you can be self-accounting – create a culture of consistency, adjust your mindset, set timeline for yourself, set key performance indicators, discipline yourself to act on a task at a time, design a method to track your progress, reward yourself and find honest feedbacks. Part of the skills of self-accountability is the strength to let go of desired things that cannot and should not be.
Congratulations as you propose to lead yourself through this new year. Remember, as Lao Tzu tells us, mastering others is strength, mastering yourself is where the true power really lies. And if you “can rule your mind” as Horace expects of you, you can rule your life and the society by extension. The big deal is not in making new year resolutions, the big deal lies in your sustained actions in achieving them. It is important you lead yourself aright because it will add to our national productivity measures.
Ekpa, a lawyer and leadership consultant, writes via ekpastanleyekpa@gmail.com
