Your Better Self with Akanna: Easier Said Than Done

It’s a new year! And with that comes new year resolutions. By now, resolutions have become cliché – just because of the many times we’ve seen people make them and inevitably break them. 

Many stats out there will tell you that a huge percentage of those who make new year resolutions break them before February. That’s tragic. Obviously, we want to do better. After all, these resolutions are usually geared toward making our lives better. Therefore, breaking them is not at all intentional. 

So why then do we break our resolutions and so early for that matter? 

Let’s think for a moment about where you work. I know your company usually sets goals for each year – whether financial or otherwise – and most times achieves those goals. Why do you think they do? It’s because of leadership. They have people in certain positions that drive the organization into achieving those goals.

You, on the other hand, don’t have that set-up in your own personal life. You are your own leader. It is up to you to achieve your goals. There’s no external person to ‘force’ you to do so, like at work. But you want to create that external pressure so you go ahead and announce your goals and resolutions to everyone around you, hoping that somehow that will hold you accountable and ‘force’ you to achieve those goals. 

However, that doesn’t happen. Instead, you are praised for being so goal-oriented, so forward-looking, and so ambitious. And your head begins to swell. You begin to feel like you’ve already achieved those goals and you tell more people about them to curry more praise from them. And that’s the way it goes… until you’ve spent the whole year telling people about what you intend to achieve without actually achieving them. 

Talk is cheap. And you’ll soon realize that. These things are much easier said than done, especially when saying them gets the same responses as if they were already done.

Achieving your goals involves leadership — leading yourself. Most people forget that you can lead, not just others, but yourself as well. Lead yourself into achieving your goals. 

Achieving your goals and resolutions depends less on what you should do and more on who you should become. And you should become a leader. 

Self-discipline is a great mark of leadership. And speaking in a measured and thoughtful way is the first proof of self-discipline. When you think about a great leader, say a politician, you don’t usually think about the one who went everywhere making lofty promises about what he wanted to achieve. Rather, you think of the one who, in quiet action, brought his people out of a bad place to a much better one. 

That is how to run your life — in quiet action. Set your goals and don’t make noise about them. Nobody really cares about your effort until they’ve seen the results. So quietly set out to achieving your goals this year and let your results speak for themselves and speak for you too. Then the accolades you get would be more meaningful this time, not hindering you from achieving what you know you can, but reassuring you instead that you can do it again! 

Here is wishing you a Happy New Year! And the successful achievement of all your goals with; of course, here is a reminder that merely talking about them openly, before doing anything about them, renders them much easier said than done.