STAYING TRUE, FINISHING STRONG
Well hello there!
Happy New Year!
How has 2023 been for
you so far?
Welcome to today’s gist.
When we left off the
gist last year, I was talking about learning lessons to take into the New Year.
Today we’ll be gisting about how easy it is to slip back into old patterns. For
the most part, I think it would be safe to assume that we have all set goals
for what we want to have achieved by the 31st of December: whether
you call them goals, or resolutions, or prayer requests, the general idea
behind them is the same –we have all envisioned how we want to grow and advance
in this year.
And in these first days
of the year, it is easy to remember and keep pushing, but we usually would find
that by January’s end or maybe March, the morale don low! And we find ourselves
slipping back into the “comfort of our old ways”, and the result? We find that
at the end of the year we’ve done little to nothing to improve ourselves during
the year, believe me when I say I speak from experience(s). Habits are habits
for a reason; they are settled patterns we have over time found ourselves in
constant practice of. They say creating habits is never as hard as breaking
them; because these behaviours have become ingrained in us, it is always easier
to fall back to them, never mind that they are harmful to us.
I’ve found that the
challenge is never in setting goals or making resolutions, it is in following
through with them. In the words of my Chaplain from Secondary School, “it is in
finishing strong”. I’m going to be sharing a few ways we can guard ourselves
from growing cold in our pursuit of development in 2023.
The first way is to put
God at the reins of your plans. This is the surest way to success in your plans
for 2023. Too often we let ourselves be deceived into thinking we should not ‘disturb
God’ with our plans: the mistake in that is that we forget that only He can
actually enable us to succeed in the plans we’ve made, we are only as strong as
God enables us, so we must constantly be in communiqué and sync with
God for us to be able to achieve our 2023 goals.
The next thing I’ve
found to be helpful is to break your goals into little achievable bits. They say
tiny droplets make an ocean. We have grand ideas of what we want to achieve but
how many times do we go further to set out plans for how we want to achieve them? You cannot
just say you want to do something and stop there, how do you want to achieve
this thing you’ve set for yourself? Breaking the goals into little bits would
help make them more realistic and attainable to you; in chipping off the goals in
little bits, you find that you end up attaining the goal.
The next thing I want
to advise is to set up an accountability system. The year is early, look at
your individual goals and think of the people in your life who can help you stay on course in achieving them. Find someone to
whom you have to report your progress on specific goals to and reach out to
them. Ask them to keep you accountable throughout the year, set up a structure
for how and when you would give them feedback on your progress and stick to it.
If possible, have rewards and/or punishments for yourself. Don’t depend only on
yourself to do the work this year, you go fail o!
Finally, you see that
place where you’ve written your goals down? Don’t just close the book or folder
and leave it at that. Set up periodic intervals where you would go back to those
goals and take an assessment; it could be monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly,
whichever works for you. Set reminders on your phone to remind you to go back
to these goals and assess yourself on how far you would have gone toward
achieving them in the time you set. The advantage of this is that when you
check and see that you are not putting the effort you should towards achieving
your goals, you can give yourself the push or wake-up call you need to begin to
do better. If you wait to only do assessment at the end of the year, all you
would have are regrets; periodic assessments will afford you the opportunity to
correct your mistakes in time.
I pray that in this
year the opportunities God has prepared for us will not meet us unprepared for
them! Have a fruitful 2023!
See you next week!
Love,
Achenyo.
PS, today is my father’s
birthday, so whenever you read this post, do say a prayer for him. Thank you!
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