Forty-something years postponing your plans...

The end of the year is approaching, and it's easy to spend at least 1 minute of your time reviewing what you did and what you postponed throughout this ending year. And looking ahead to next year? "New year's resolutions", "propósitos para el año entrante" don't you get the feeling of repeating the same thing every year and not creating anything new? How do you build something different for the year ahead?

Lead, follow or get out of the way [Thomas Paine]

1.- Become the leading character of your own story. There's no way to create your future except by starting from this question: what are my desires? No one can define it better than you: what do you want to be when you grow up. And it may well be dizzying. And you can change that statement tomorrow morning if you think you got it wrong tonight. It's not about getting your desires right, it's about prioritizing your energy toward what really matters to you. And making it happen is another task.

Procrastination is the thief of time. [English Proverb]

2.- Write down your desires and you'll never be able to postpone them.
Afraid of not being consistent? If you truly know how to formulate your list of desires, there's no way to postpone them. Now, when you write a list of your desires, make sure to write desires, not self-reproaches. People don't go to the gym because they don't actually want to exercise. Going to the gym is a band-aid over a self-reproach, not a desire. If what you desire is to lose weight, or not to die because your health sucks, then lose weight or change your diet. Don't rationalize the solution to your desires, simply desire and don't worry about how to get to that desire. Let the universe take care of the details.

Plant seeds of failure and failure will follow. [Sidney Madwed]

3.- If you already know what you desire, now it's about making it happen. Even though most educational institutions know it, they still haven't integrated the fact that we human beings function better with positive reinforcement than with punishment. Review your list of desires every week and celebrate one step forward. Stop reproaching yourself for what you haven't done. It's better to celebrate a small milestone than to remind yourself every week what's still pending. We'll get to the end of the year. Right now, we're getting started.
There's more meat on this method, and with these 3 steps you already have more than 80% of the way done.

The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows [Sidney J. Harris]

And now get to work and turn what's left of this year and the next one into a dream factory. I've been at it for years myself, and I still have a whole lifetime of dreams left to manufacture. Even if it's just to change a habit, I invite you to start.

This post was originally published on MY BLOG

Bernardo Crespo is a Digital Transformation Leader and a certified Ontological Coach by Newfield Network in Bogotá (Colombia). He holds a degree in Business Administration from UCLM and completed his final year of a BA Honours in Management and Economics at the University of St Andrews. He holds an Executive Master's in Relationship Marketing, CRM and E-Commerce from ICEMD and teaches at various business schools in Spain. He worked as digital marketing director at BBVA España.

I currently help companies walk the path of Digital Transformation at DIVISADERO.

I've discovered, and keep discovering, the beauty of play applied outside of play #gamification