New Year's Resolutions: Choose a Theme for the Year

Happy New Year!!! I hope you had wonderful holiday. I’m going to be doing short weekly videos talking about various coaching and career-related topics, including leadership and business development.  Today’s topic is choosing a theme for the year!  While this topic is not exclusively for lawyers, frankly, lawyers on average tend to be so overworked and so focused on getting things done that most of us can benefit from stepping back for a bit and looking at the bigger picture.

When I talk about a theme for the year, I’m talking about the lens through which you choose to approach your resolutions, your projects, or whatever you are up to – professional, personal, all of it. A theme is really any positive concept like partnership, ease, excellence, joy, balance, anything that adds another level of inspiration or positive feeling to your goals and projects. 

For example, maybe you have (1) a business development plan, (2) a goal to spend more time with friends and family, and (3) a goal to lose weight.  What theme would support and enhance all of those goals? It will vary from person to person. There is no right answer.  One person might choose “connection” as their theme, focusing on deeper relationships with clients and potential clients, deeper connections with loved ones, and connection with his or her own body (and what food would make that body feel healthy and strong). Someone else might choose creativity. He could focus on finding more innovative ways to engage with clients and potential clients; getting creative about how to spend more time with loved ones, or engaging in more creative activities with them, and finding new approaches to make dieting more fun or effective.  I had a client once who chose as her theme “apple pie” which to her represented warmth, nurturing and caring; so you really could go a lot of different directions with this.

Typically, the biggest problem people have with goals and projects is that they either lose motivation and don’t do what they planned or they follow through and achieve the goal but don’t find it satisfying. The great thing about adding a theme into the mix is that it BOTH helps you to stay inspired and motivated AND it also increases the likelihood that accomplishing the goal will lead to true satisfaction! 

My theme for the year is joy – which has been a bit of a roller coaster already, but I will tell you about that another time.