Happy New Year to you all!
The end of the year is a strange time for many. There’s the rush to get all your work finished before the holiday. There’s all that running around, sorting out Christmas presents and a big fat turkey for dinner. Then you have time off work and the visits with the family.
Christmas and New Year also provide an opportunity for reflection and also, inevitably, New Year’s resolutions.
Although I didn’t have turkey for Christmas, I did have all the other madness.
Reflecting on the year, I began to appreciate the importance of setting achievable, well defined goals. This is where my apology comes in.
I realise now that the task I set myself to achieve by Christmas was crazy. With all the other tasks on my to-do list, somehow sanity escaped me when I decided to put my Christmas lists together.
Actually, the idea was sound. The crazy bit was how little time I had to complete my goals. I put my plan together during a quiet work period and was then distracted from it by all the other tasks that needed doing. Those other tasks suffered too as a result of everything on the to-do list.
However I’m not going to beat myself up too much.
The plan was to illustrate the 10 Great Ways To Differentiate Yourself For Christmas with videos of me accomplishing all these things with my clients. There’s some great video in the can and I’ll be using it for Christmas 2010, planning much earlier ahead to ensure that the great content is created and posted.
I promised a second list of 10 Great Things To Send Your Clients (Or Contacts) For Christmas. The list was put together and I was waiting for a few other things to fall into place and they didn’t happen in time. I wanted to provide great resources and illustrations and I now realise that trying to get things done quickly during Christmas, especially when depending on others, can be a difficult task.
One example of this is the courier who left me waiting for an important part of the second list for nearly two weeks. No amount of cajoling by the parcel sender, the courier’s client, could get them to perform as promised and contracted. I waited and waited and no parcel arrived. Finally, the day before Christmas Eve, I found the time to go to the courier depot and claim my un-delivered parcel.
Equally, some promises made to me went un-fulfilled. Without all the pieces in place, I couldn’t finish and share what I had hoped to.
Several people at other companies really got on board with the idea of 10 Great Things To Send Your Clients (Or Contacts) For Christmas and helped out in various ways. My promises to them are still outstanding and one resolution of mine is to ensure that one way or another the promise is fulfilled and their efforts in helping me are rewarded. As I put these things right I’ll be sharing them with you because what these people have to offer is great and worth getting hold of.
I apologise to myself for setting what became unrealistic goals, to my readers for not completing what I’d promised and I apologise to the partners who helped me for not getting everything done at my end of the bargain.
Everyone makes mistakes and I think that it’s important to recognise those mistakes, apologise for them and learn from them to ensure that they are not repeated. And then you have to move on.
2010 brings a fresh start and renewed energy. I’m working right now on a great new program for February, details coming in the next few days.
So my most valuable lesson from the end of 2009 and going into this new decade is to have clear and achievable objectives that can be accomplished and which move me closer to my long-term goals.
Looking foward to a great year,
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