7 Key Success Factors For Personal Improvement

Mid-Year Resolutions. Make Yours Now. 

Living A Determined Life is an opportunity to continuously examine your life in an on-going manner that helps you build and journey on a path that mentally, emotionally and spiritually aligns with your life's purpose. 

It also means making continuous personal improvements, or what the Japanese call kaizen. For many, this means thinking of personal development as an on-going self-improvement project, or what we call Project You. 

Since personal development should be an ongoing process, we have launched the Mid-Year Resolutions initiative. Research shows that over 80% of all New Year’s Resolutions fail to be achieved, and over 50% have been dropped by the middle of the year, so this is an opportune time to reflect; take account of your personal goals, dreams and hopes; and re-ignite your Determined Life Journey. 

As we wrote in yesterday’s blog post, there are many reasons why we fail at personal change. For one thing, scientific research shows it takes an average of 66 days for a new behavior to become a new habit. So if you start today, any personal improvement change will become a new habit around early September (just after Labor Day in the U.S.).

Here are 7 Key Success Factors for Implementing Personal Improvement Change: 

1. Put time aside daily / weekly to review the actions you are taking and monitoring progress. 
2. Give priority to your personal improvement initiative over other daily tasks. 
3. Write your personal goals in a SMART format (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound). 
4. Share your goals with others and allow them to hold you accountable. (It's not as scary as it sounds!) 
5. Focus on only 1-3 change initiatives at a time. 
6. Track progress and course correct as necessary. 
7. Recognize your effort and rewards you success. 

Details on these key success factors can be found in our article 7 Key Success Factors for Implementing Personal Change.

Who says personal resolutions can only be made at the start of the year? Don’t fall into this trap. We are at the mid-point of 2017, which makes this an ideal time for re-assessing your personal goals and re-igniting your motivation with some Mid-Year Resolutions.

Please share these thoughts and the article on the 7 Key Success Factors for Implementing Personal Change with your family and friends, and in social media using #MidYearResolutions. Thank you.

Many Reasons Why We Fail At Personal Change

7 Key Success Factors for Implementing Personal Improvement

The year is half over. For many of us those personal change goals we set back in January are no longer on track. What’s worse is that far too many will wait until next January to set themselves new personal improvement goals.

In fact, despite an abundance of motivation and sense of purpose we originally assign to our New Year’s Resolutions, the large majority of these personal change plans are abandoned within the first 90 days of each year. Research shows that 80% of all New Year’s Resolutions result in failure or are not achieved.

Why is this so? What causes such remarkable low results?

There are numerous reasons behind such dismal outcomes. We believe the main factors that contribute the most to any personal improvement effort failing to achieve the desired outcome are:

• People do not make the top of mind, each and every day. 
• People attempt too many initiatives simultaneously. This is particularly true at the start of the year when the typical New Year's Resolutions list reaches double-digit figures. 
• There is no prioritization, with each resolution being treating as equally important. 
• An unwillingness to just "say no" to distractions and other initiatives. 
• No concrete action plans. Just wishful thinking that change will somehow magically happen. 
• A failure to turn the desired change into a daily habit. 
• Not allowing others to hold us accountable. Keeping our change initiatives private to ourselves indicates we only have to answer to ourselves. And we are all too good at rationalizing our way out of making change. 
• Not putting our goals into a quantifiable format. 
• Not racking our progress or keeping journals to know what is working, and what is not.

 
Get Your Personal Improvement Goals Back on Track

Today, at the midpoint of the year, is a perfect time to review the progress of your personal improvement plans and implement our Mid-Year Resolutions game plan to re-ignite your personal change efforts.

To help you with this, our 7 Key Success Factors for Implementing Personal Change tips will help you overcome the hurdles listed above.

Scientific research shows that it takes on average 66 days for a new behavior to become a new habit. That’s a little over two months!

No wonder so many people give up and abandon their personal improvement plans before reaching success. They typically quit too early in the process as they underestimate the time required to fully inculcate and instill a new behavior or a new change into their daily routines.

Don’t let this happen to you. If you start today, you can have a new set of personal improvement habits in place before summer ends.

Go for it. Start Living A Determined Life by getting your personal improvement goals back on track. 

Please help others discover the power of Mid-Year Resolutions by sharing this post in your social media posts using the hashtag #MidYearResolutions. Many thanks. 

Mid-Year Resolutions | #MidYearResolutions

Re-Ignite Your Personal and Professional Development Goals

Welcome to the midpoint of 2017. Yep, the year is officially half over.

What’s happened to those New Year’s Resolutions you made a short six months ago? How many are on track? How many have you abandoned?

If you are disappointed in the answers to these questions, don’t be dismayed. Did you know that the failure rate of New Year’s Resolutions is over 80%. In fact, research shows that over 50% of all New Year’s Resolutions have been dropped by mid year.

Most people will wait until the beginning of the next new year to set personal resolutions and goals, simply because there is no social protocol suggesting they do otherwise. You can change this for yourself, as this video explains: 

Help us make Mid-Year Resolutions a new ritual by sharing this blog and the above video with your family and friends.

As for yourself (and them as well), we have two free articles on the Living A Determined Life website to help in making Mid-Year Resolutions:

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•  Why Personal Change Initiatives Often Fail 

•   7 Key Success Factors for Implementing Personal Change

These two articles, combined with the Personal Change Action Plan tool that you will also find on our website, will help you kick-start your personal growth and self-development. They will also help you get those New Year’s Resolutions back on track, provided they are still relevant and meaningful to you.

Help spread the word with hashtag #MidYearResolutions.

Together we can help others also achieve their personal development goals. Now isn’t that a positive way to start the second half of the year?

The Importance of Persistence In Personal Development

Persistence Needs To Be Applied With a Deliberate and Considered Approach To Your Personal Development

When it comes to your own life and self development, it is necessary to eliminate the concept of "failure" from your thinking. 

Instead, treat any perception of failure as a mere setback and as a learning opportunity experience.

Persistence is the willingness and resilience to keep pressing on, even when you feel like your stores of commitment, determination, optimism, and passion are all but dried up. Take comfort in the knowledge that these internal wells of personal strength, courage and energy will never be totally empty, even when it might seem so. 

7 Key Elements of Life Full of Adversity and Challenges 

Many battles require physical, emotional and/or spiritual strength to win. Some battles, however, also require persistence. As Mahatma Gandhi said, "Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will."

Having an indomitable will ─ an innate and deep-seated capacity for persistence and perseverance ─ can make all the difference in the world.

As Buddha said, "In the confrontation between the stream and the rock, the stream always wins ─ not through strength but by perseverance."

As they are for the streams and rivers in this world, persistence and perseverance can be the roots of your own victories over confrontations, adversity and the obstacles, hurdles, problems, difficulties, and obstructive people that you will come across on your personal journey through this thing we call life. 

We have more thoughts on personal growth and development, plus hundreds of motivational quotes, in our book Project You: Words of Wisdom. It is available at Amazon in paperback ($6.45) and Kindle ($3.88) formats. 

This article is partially excerpted from our top-ranked personal development book Project You: Living A Determined Life, which is also available in Kindle and paperback formats at Amazon. 

More Thoughts on Overcoming Personal Adversity

The Road to Personal Improvement Is Paved With Persistence and Resiliency 

When times get tough and your situation looks bleak, perhaps these words from the novelist Charlotte Bronte will provide comfort and encouragement: "If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant; if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcomed."

Being persistent and remaining on the path you've chosen will habitually require a great deal of patience, especially if you are having to deal with other people and all the baggage, troubles, emotional strife, self doubt, pessimism, anger, anxiety, and fear they carry with them. As the French poet Jean de la Fontaine said, "Patience and passage of time do more than strength and fury."

7 Key Elements of Life 

Rather than get angry at problematic situations and people, or attempt to blow through either of these with the power of your own convictions or actions, a judicial application of patience and fortitude will usually go a long way in creating a resolution. As the Irish proverb states, "For what cannot be cured, patience is best."

Here are three quotes by very different personalities that highlight the virtues of being patient and the pitfalls of being impatient:

Wise and slow; they stumble that run fast. ~William Shakespeare

The twin killers of success are impatience and greed. ~Jim Rohn

Unreasonable haste is the direct road to error. ~Jean Baptiste Moliere

Persistence and perseverance also need to be applied with a deliberate and considered approach to your own self development. 

As David Fischman writes, "The true road to personal improvement is not miraculous; it is slow and calls for a great deal of perseverance, but it is indeed possible to progress along this road, and your effort will be amply repaid."  

Please take 15 minutes and write down some ideas on how you can be more persistent and resilient in facing the challenges, hurdles and obstacles today in the seven areas of life depicted in the visual above. 

And, if you or someone you know is looking for good motivational ideas and quotes in this area, please see our book Project You: Words of Wisdom, available at Amazon for just $6.45 in paperback and $3.88 in Kindle format.

This article is partially excerpted from our top-ranked personal development book Project You: Living A Determined Life, also available at Amazon in paperback and Kindle formats.