MY TWO CENTS:
Happy New Year!!
Hope you had a wonderful Christmas, exciting New Year’s celebration, and are off to a great start for the New Year!
We wrapped up last year with a “formula” for Excellence. As a reminder, here’s what I shared:
Excellence = Right thinking + Purposefully Practiced Action
I committed to sharing the responses from my request about your thoughts on that formula. Here is my summary from the sentiments shared:
- Right thinking is considering how my actions will impact others, and whether a choice for my benefit will create a negative impact for someone else;
- Purposefully practiced action is working to apply that thinking even when difficult situations arise and it would be easier for me to choose my own benefit.
As I thought through that summary and considered some of my own thoughts on how to make 2022 our best year yet in the pursuit of excellence, I was reminded of a few things that I do personally to keep myself on track. Maybe these will be of value to you, as well.
- Establishing a word or phrase of the year: the intent for this activity is to find something that reminds you of your purposeful focus for the year. As I’ve done this for nearly 10 years, it’s pretty amazing to see how this focus helps keep me from wandering too far down rabbit trails away from what I said really matters.
- Setting goals: faith, family, fitness, friends, finances are what I call the Five Fs of goal setting. I know I sound like a broken record when it comes to goal-setting. One thing I learned last year, though, was that fewer and more purposeful goals allow me to more easily maintain focus, provide a higher likelihood of achieving, and are simply more fun!
- Building an Activity Tracker: making a game out of doing your reps. This may seem like a strange concept to some, but please allow me to use a sports analogy. When we see professional athletes on the field of play doing amazing things for an hour or two per week, we often forget that they’ve spent countless hours in the gym, in practice, and in properly fueling themselves that we never get to see. The Activity Tracker is simply identifying the day-to-day, and sometimes mundane, activities that allow you to make progress toward your highest priorities. Then, you simply assign points to each activity based on how important that activity is to achieving your purpose. You can make your own game with your own points, but I know that I’ve had a productive week working toward my highest priorities when I hit 25 points that week.
One of the freeing things I’ve learned over the course of the last 10 or 15 years is that everyone is on their own journey AND at a different place on that journey. We are grateful for the opportunity to support everyone for whom we have the privilege to serve on their own journey and at their own pace. With that in mind, I couldn’t be more excited about what is in store for 2022 and I hope you’re excited, too!!
Make it a great week!
Scott Cousino, CFP®, CEPA®
President