Best Advice on New Year Aspirations

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New year comes with new aspirations. You could be thinking of having a healthier lifestyle, starting a family, or making a career change. Almost at the same time as you declare the goals, doubts tagged along. Am I being too ambitious? I didn’t manage to do it last year, will I succeed this time? I have so many ideas, which one to prioritize?...

 

The most enlightening habit change insight I've come across is from James Clear, the author of New York Time's best-selling book Atomic Habit, he said "You don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems." 

 

"Your system is the collection of daily habits that you follow", and your goals are the output of what you put into the system. Instead of spending your time contemplating on which goals to set or polishing them, focus on cultivating constructive daily habits, building a system that creates a change in you.

 

And how to create good habits? There are millions of advices out there on creating habits. The most resonating and grounded for me is what master coach Terrie Lupberger called the "Conscious Practice" -- "thoughtful, intentional, repeatable routines, engaged in overtime", starting from small things, and in time, they make big differences. 

 

My whole journey of reinventing myself from marketing to leadership coaching actually started from a small practice of journaling, 10 mins each morning on my way to work, jotting down thoughts, ideas, ideas, questions on my Notes APP as they show up.  That continuous thin stream of introspections gradually led to greater clarity of who I am and what I really want.

 

If you keep living in the same system, going through the same routine for the next 300 over days, you will deliver the same results. To have change, make a change. 

 

So, what is one small conscious practice you would like to start today? 



Dannie Zhuang is an executive coach and leadership development consultant at Linkage Asia, a certified coach by the International Coach Federation, who spent her earlier career in wide-ranging international positions in P&G and Unilever. She lived and worked in six countries across Europe and Asia, and now residing in the tropical Singapore with her husband and a little one. 



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