Each year I set a personal mantra for myself for the year ahead.
I’ve found this to be the most effective way to help me create changes in my life for the year ahead and achieve a number of goals.
What do I mean when I say personal mantra? 🤔
A personal mantra is a phrase or statement that you say to yourself to encourage (and remind) you to act, behave or respond in a particular way in alignment with a value or a goal that is important to you.
I update my personal mantra each year, because as you grow and life unfolds, what you need to intentionally tell yourself will change.
How do you create your personal mantra for the year?
Step 1: Reflect on Your Wins, Challenges & Learnings from the Prior Year
I easily get triggered by competition and tell myself that I must also do whatever it is, just better.
My strategy has therefore often been both professionally and personally to try and do everything and be amazing at it all, in the belief that this will create incredible success.
Because I’m super productive I get a lot done, but it also means I’m doing a LOT of stuff that just doesn’t make an impact. It keeps me busy and impacts my ability to make real progress on things important to me. 😞
Writing this down, it’s pretty obvious this is a pretty shitty strategy. Doing everything pretty much is a guarantee you won’t be amazing at anything.
Step 2: What do you want to achieve this year?
I’d like to be to work less and be more available to support my family while impacting more young people through growing Art of Smart Education. 💪
Step 3: Create Your Mantra for the Year
I want to be able to work A LOT smarter in 2022 by more intentionally identifying which high leverage activities I should focus on personally and professionally that will have the biggest impact.
My personal mantra for 2022 is:
Focus on the One Big Domino (FOBD for short).
So for 2022, my big singular focus is on working smarter and focusing on high leverage activities that produce results.
What will working smarter actually look like in practice?
Step 1: Ask the Focusing Question
Gary Keller in the book, The One Thing has a fantastic question you can use to really get to the heart of what you should focus on:
Step 2: Review What I’m Already Doing and Apply the KSS Protocol
I’m applying the Focusing Question to everything I’m currently doing to identify what I need to keep, start and stop doing.
Keep, Start, Stop Protocol:
On reflection, what should I keep, start, and stop doing?
Step 3: Rigorously Prioritising my Monthly & Daily To-Do Lists
This review and prioritisation will happen on two levels:
Level 1: Are these tasks in alignment with my answer to the Focusing Question and my KSS Protocol?
Level 2: Out of what I could do today, what will have the highest impact in alignment with my goals?
What would you like to do differently in 2022?
I’d love to hear what your personal mantra is! Let me know in the comments 👇
