Plan Your Start / Stop List

Start / Stop Challenge

This is one of my favorite things to do each year.

After all of the goal setting, action planning, visualizing, etc is done. (Or even instead of all of those things if it’s too overwhelming.) It’s time to break it down.

Grand gestures sound good, but are often difficult to sustain. It’s the small things that you do consistently that make the difference, not the big things you do occasionally.

They say it takes 21 days to create a new habit, and each month is about 30 days long, so break your goals down into small actions that you can implement one each month.

Each month pick one thing to start and one thing to stop. ie. Start getting 8 hours of sleep and stop charging your phone by your bed – which means you usually stay up later scrolling through social media or watching Netflix.

These can be in any category of your life. I like to alternate one business and then one personal.

Hint: The smaller the action the more likely this will work. Revamping your diet to eliminate gluten, dairy and sugar is a noble endeavor, but that’s a huge change and one that’s likely to receive some resistance. So maybe your goal is to start eating a vegetable at every meal and stop eating dessert.

Start small. What are 3 things you can do to increase your business in 2020? Make more calls each week? Start doing market updates for your clients? Master your presentations? Pick one to work on each month.

It’s tempting to do everything in January, after all that thing you have on the list for December seems so far away, and wouldn’t you benefit from it now? Probably, but the reality is that doing all of these at one time will likely work for a week or two and then feel too overwhelming to continue.

Have fun with it and remember: Imperfect action is better than perfect planning.

To your success!
Nicole

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