Insurance Agents: Four Tips for Meeting Your New Years Resolutions

New Years resolutions are made to be broken. But they don’t have to be. If you’re both realistic about what you can accomplish and systematic about the steps you take, you’ll have a better chance of keeping the resolutions you set for your business. Here are a few tips for setting goals in the New Year that you can keep all year long.

Figure out how you’re doing. Take a look at your past year. What did you accomplish? Take a look at your finances—did you earn more than the year before? Did you bring in more customers? Did you develop an important business partnership? What other changes did you see in your business?

It’s always good to look at your record over the past year and acknowledge how much you accomplished over the year before you decide to move on. It’s also important to keep track of the health of your business. A financial review can be particularly helpful.

Decide what you want. Once you have an idea of how the past year has gone, think about what you’d ideally like to accomplish in the next year. Maybe you’d like to grow your customer base or start selling a new line of insurance. Or maybe your office is growing and you’ll need to get a new space, or hire a few new staff. Maybe it’s time to start stepping up your marketing, overhauling your website, or starting to build your social media presence. Write out a wish list—no goal is too audacious.

List the ways you can get there. Once you have an idea of what you’d like to accomplish, write down each goal as the head of a column. Underneath, write all the steps you’d have to take to accomplish each one. Some might have long lists of steps, while others might just require a few, repeated many times. Get a sense of the size of the tasks you’ve set for yourself. At this point, it’s a good idea to think back on what you accomplished in the past year to get a sense of what’s realistic. Some might be two- or five-year goals, too big to accomplish in a year.

Break large projects up into small, doable goals. Now that you’ve identified which goals it’s realistic to tackle and what it will take to get there, take a closer look at each one. Take each big step and break that up into smaller steps. Keep going until you’ve got a lot of small, achievable steps—each one you could accomplish in a day or a week.

Once you’ve done that, you can get a sense of what you’d need to do in a typical day or week in order to move closer to your goals—every day, every week, and every month of the year. Set an ideal schedule of steps you can take each day or each week to get there. The key is to stay realistic, and always bite off less than you can chew. If you think your task list for the week will be too easy, that’s ideal—if it really turns out to be, you can always add more to it.

Now you have an idea of what you’d like to do over the next year, realistic ways to accomplish it, and the small, doable steps you’ll need to take over the next days and weeks in order to get what you want. Set a start date after the New Year—maybe a few days after to recover from holiday stress. Continually reassess what’s realistic over the year, and keep breaking big goals down into small, achievable steps—and you should be able to keep your New Years’ resolutions throughout the year.

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