Three upgrades you might not have thought about that will help you achieve your goals in the new year

A new year is upon us—2019. Many have set goals, others have made resolutions. At my gym, I am seeing a lot of new faces (and new gym clothes). New Year, new you right? Well, not really.

A new year is only that – a new year. There is no inherent magic to it. A change in the last digit of the Gregorian calendar by itself definitely does not guarantee a change in you any more than changing the date on a wine bottle with a sharpie changes the flavour (or price) of the contents.

What will change you in 2019 and help you achieve your goal are deliberate upgrades you make. And no, I am not talking about getting the latest iPhone or vehicular bells and whistles—I am talking about upgrades to yourself!

Therefore, in this article, I want to share three aspects of yourself that, if upgraded this year, will exponentially improve your odds of success at achieving your goals. Let us begin.

Upgrade Your skills

To have more, you have to do more. And to do more, you need to have more skills. So to have more, you need to have more skills. Therefore, this upgrade makes the first in my list. If you are planning to change jobs or careers or perhaps start (or grow) a business, the skills you acquire (or upgrade) will make a huge difference. The right skills are game-changers. It is quite possible that the divide between you and the achievement of your goals—whether they are personal or professional – is a missing skill or set of skills. So, to bridge the gap, learn the skills.

One way to do this is to find out what skills the people who are already operating at the level you want are using. Next, choose from among them the one that makes the most sense given your situation. All that is now left is to invest time and resources to learn it. You can read about accelerated learning techniques in my series here. And you can learn a specific learning hack for certification exams here. But back to the upgrade and its benefits.

Not only does learning new skills improve your prospects, but the process can also be deeply satisfying and a big boost to your self-esteem. As a bonus, learning new skills is good for your brain health. Add to this the greater chance of attaining your goals, and I say this upgrade is a win win win win!!

Upgrade your attitude

Do you know someone who is extremely talented, skillful and capable, but is a pain in the butt to work with? Or maybe is very negative? Or confrontational or lazy or….? Sad isn’t it? So much potential being stifled by a bad attitude.

I once read somewhere (can’t recall where now) the phrase - your attitude determines your altitude. I think this was a stretch the writer made for the sake of rhyme and style, but I do believe that our attitudes make a huge difference in what we achieve in life. That is, the heights we ascend to – our altitude (hmmm… maybe the writer of the phrase was onto something after all).

In any case, to achieve your goals, upgrading your skills may not be enough. Heck, it may not even be necessary. You might already have the skills you need but an attitudinal flaw may be keeping you from your potential. I remember setting a financial goal many years ago and failing… woefully. It turned out the problem was not my skill with spreadsheets, budgeting apps or arithmetic. After all, I knew my mobile banking app like the back of my hand and had all kinds of other apps telling me in an array of multi-coloured charts and graphs that my finances were in one colour – red.

Turns out the root issue was with my attitude and beliefs about money, not my math or tech-savvy.

...to achieve your goals, upgrading your skills may not be enough. Heck, it may not even be necessary. You might already have the skills you need but an attitudinal flaw may be keeping you from your potential.

No matter how many apps I downloaded and automatic debit orders I issued, I was not able to achieve my financial goal until I had a sober conversation with myself about my attitude toward money. Once that was dealt with and my attitude got an upgrade to match reality, I achieved and even exceeded my previously elusive financial goal with little effort.

Sometimes, the mindset is what needs an upgrade for everything else to work properly. Just like a software upgrade can make a computer run much smoother and faster even with no changes to the material components.Now for the third upgrade.

Upgrade your habits

I could have easily started with this one as it drives a huge portion of our lives. We are truly creatures of habit – and with good reason.We can’t think consciously about everything and so habits help us automate repetitive decisions like what shoe to wear first – right or left, and when and how often (or if) to brush our teeth. But beyond obvious actions like these, we also have habits of thought, habits of speech, habits for most everything.

In an article from a special edition of Time Magazine on the subject, author Jeffrey Kluger writes of habits:

They torment us and yet protect us, drive us mad and yet keep us safe. It all depends on which habits we learn and which ones we lose

- Jeffrey Kluger

Habits are so powerful that they can override willpower and by some estimates, up to 40% of our waking lives are spent under the sway of unconscious habits.So, do you think that upgrading what you are spending nearly half of your day-to-day life doing would make a powerful impact on the results you produce?Yeah, I do too. The question, therefore, becomes - how do you upgrade your habits in the easiest way possible?Let us spend some time on this, shall we?

Guide to upgrading habits – nature abhors a vacuum

First, you need to identify what habits are bad – sleeping late, eating junk food, over watching TV, being short with your family, procrastination etc. Your list may look different but you get the idea.

Next, watch yourself. Charles Duhigg the author of the bestselling book – The Power of Habit – explains that habits run by a cycle of Cue – Routine – Reward.

For example, a cue to sleeping late might be that you see the TV in your living room.

The routine is that you log in to Netflix and spend hours watching. Usually, this routine is the observed behaviour and I have found can masquerade as the “habit”.

The reward is that all the dazzling Ultra HD 4K resolution programming helps you suspend disbelief, transports you to fantasy and genuinely makes you feel better – for a while…

Next thing you know 1 am rolls around and you realize, like you do every weeknight, that you have to be up at 6 am to head out to work. All of a sudden, that “last” episode of Game of Thrones you convinced yourself you absolutely needed to watch has left a bitter aftertaste in your mouth in spite of the cans of pop you have been mindlessly consuming during your TV binge.

Furthermore, this cycle is self-reinforcing. That is, each time you run the routine, it gets stronger and more likely to run again.

Cue–Routine–Reward.

Duhigg’s advise to break the cycle? Keep the cue. Keep the reward. But change the routine.

For out Netflix addict, that might look like this.

Cue – come home and see the TV in the living room.

Routine – read a non-fiction book in a career or personal development subject for an hour.

Reward – spend 30 minutes (and only 30 minutes) watching your favourite show with a beverage you enjoy.

Doing this routine-swap repeatedly is like driving down the well-established paths of past behaviour to new (and better) behaviour. It works so much better than trying blaze new trails.

Upgrading Your Habits

Your cues are likely different. As are your routines and rewards. But to upgrade your habits, don’t start with the routine (which is what many people do). Start with the Cue.

For me, I was able to build a habit of exercise by tying a new routine – go to the gym – with a cue – lunchtime at work. And a reward – a tasty meal at the end or a yummy smoothie (which I would usually get at lunchtime anyway). This singular habit upgrade has led to many benefits for me personally and professionally. You can read more about how to make excellent use of lunchtime in this article.

For now, go ahead and apply this principle to upgrading your own habits. Remember, you have the power to change yourself for the better and achieve your goals. And your habits are a key part of that.

Got goals? Then you are already on the way

There is good news. By setting goals in the first place, you have already taken an important step to building new habits. Psychologists call goals that lead to changed habits keystone habits. The keystone habit – the truly desired goal – starts a ripple effect through your consciousness by disrupting habit patterns that you know are contradictory to its attainment.

For example, if you set the keystone habit of living a healthy lifestyle, (and you are serious about it), you will feel some unpleasantness when scarfing down a big fat doughnut. And if you are serious about your keystone habit of being nurturing of your meaningful relationships, you will feel uneasy when you feel yourself losing your temper with your spouse or child.It would appear that those who have told us that the mere act of seriously setting goals is half-way to achieving them were not just blowing ineffectual self-help glitter dust in our faces after all.

Happy New Year

How happy and fulfilling and rewarding the new year turns out to be and whether we achieve our goals or not will depend on many factors. Some of them are not directly within our control. But for the ones that are – the ones we can directly influence – we would benefit from installing upgrades to boost our chances at success.

Remember that an investment in yourself is one that always pays dividends. Upgrade your skills, upgrade your attitudes and upgrade your habits and you will be well on your way to ending the new year a much more successful person that when you started.

Happy New Year and may your dreams come true.Until the next article, be your best and do your best.