What's to Come?

"Practice anticipatory thinking. What is likely to happen and what will you do then?"
- Brian Tracy

It's the new year and we're ready for a fresh start! New initiatives, new goals and new challenges! Are you ready for it all? Many of us have a rejuvenated sense of determination and hope, as well as overall motivation. This will help carry us at least through January while tackling the inevitable challenges that we didn't take into account or expect. Come February we still may be motivated, but we'll start to take "punches" we'll need to roll with which will start to hurt that much more. Then March... April... by the middle of the year many goals have been abandoned and we're all just trying to keep up with what's being thrown at us left and right. If you're able to anticipate what is likely to happen, then you'll be that much more prepared to address it when it does.

In business, we all operate off of some sort of goals. If you don't, then something's wrong. For the rest of us, however, it's these goals that help measure how we're doing throughout the year. Not all goals are tied directly to the success of the company overall, but sometimes just the general alignment of the intentions of the company or department. As a business owner, I have a number of different goals that sometimes overlap and intersect with each other, but it's important to know what happens when we do or don't achieve those goals. Our goal could be to get more clients to bring in additional revenue, but if we're not ready to ramp up our support staff when that happens, our quality of service may go down and the results could be a disaster. Additionally, if we ramp up our support staff ahead of time, but don't reach our goals of obtaining more clients, then the company may lose a lot of money and hurt our business potential moving forward.

Naturally, our personal lives are much the same. Let's look at one of the most known goals for many individuals... to get in shape! For some that means losing weight. For others it means bulking up your muscles. You can round it off with the rest that just long for better health and fitness in general. No matter what your goal is, it's important to understand why you're doing it and to be prepared for the many challenges that will inevitably come. Diet is a good way to sum up most "get in shape" goals, but so many diets have the same challenges year over year. Some of those include financial constraints; junk food is often cheaper than healthy food, time constraints; it takes time to commit to something like going to the gym and preparing healthier meals, and overall environment; we often include other people in our lives, but not our individual goals and therefore will feel resistance everywhere around us. By anticipating these things, you can much better prepare yourself with what to do when it happens rather than letting it derail you from your efforts and ultimately not succeed at your goal!

We can't always predict everything that may happen, but if we prepare ourselves for what could be, then we'll be in a much better position to take on the unknowns.