A Balanced and Holistic Approach to Personal Growth in 2024!

The New Year’s Resolution: What Works, what doesn’t work, and why an alternative approach can improve your chance for personal success!

Welcome, to the end of 2023!

I hope your year was prosperous; full of family, love, joy, and all the successes you dreamed and planned for at the start of the year. And I hope you achieved your New Year’s resolutions!

And hats off to you if you did because research suggest that only 9% of Americans that make resolutions complete them.

In fact, according to a recent article published by The Ohio State University, Fischer College of Business, 23% of people quit their resolution by the end of the first week, and 43% quit by the end of January.

More often than not, our New Year’s Resolutions fail due to setting unrealistic expectations, having an All-or-Nothing Mentality, Lack of Planning, a Short-Term Focus, as well as Pressure and Guilt.

And I get it, it can be extremely frustrating and down-right disappointing if not depressing.

It’s the main reason I personally no longer make New Year resolutions. I always found myself failing within a couple weeks so I completely understand and can relate to the challenges of keeping a New Year’s Resolution.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge advocate for change and personal growth, and the start of a new year is by far the best time or season to start transforming into the person you want to become.

Ultimately, whether setting a New Year’s resolution is beneficial depends on individual preferences, personality, and the nature of the resolution itself. It’s important to approach resolutions with realistic expectations, a well-defined plan, and a positive mindset.

I just prefer alternative solutions that don’t set me up for failure from the get-go.

And to the end, I want to share am approach that I’m using to plan and track my personal growth for 2024.

It’s a variant of a process I’ve used in previous years to help me recover financially after my divorce, to improve my overall physical and mental wellbeing, as well lay the foundation for my business here at Self-Sovereignty.

 (It’s also loosely modeled after corporate programs such as Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and The Balance Scorecard (BSC), which is a strategic performance management tool that helps organizations monitor and measure their performance across various perspectives to ensure they are meeting strategic objectives.

OKRs provide a framework for framing, defining and tracking goals.

And The Balance Scorecard process was created by Robert S. Kaplin and David P. Norton in the early 1990’s and is structured to provide a balanced view of an organization’s performance by considering financial and non-financial indicators.

Both OKRs and BSC are systems designed to drive change by cascading strategic goals and objectives at all levels, to better communicate, align and measure company progress. 

For example, the BSC provides executives with a comprehensive framework that translates a company’s strategic objectives into a coherent set of performance measures, and can motivate breakthrough improvements in such critical areas as product, process, customer, and market development.

While it’s beyond the scope of this article to expand on either of these models, the important take-away is to understand there are great tools available in the corporate world that can be replicated and utilized for our individual, and personal growth planning. And with much greater successes rate than a simply New Year resolution!.

Let’s start by agreeing to Toss out the New Year’s Resolutions that we know we’ll break in a week or two and focus on something that offers more measurable and sustainable outcomes. Let’s build a plan that can serve as a holistic approach and personal roadmap for growth in the new year.

To begin, we’ll first identify four (4) key strategies that can represent a holistic, high-level strategic roadmap for success in 2024.

Now, you can certainly model a plan that is unique to your individual needs, but for this exercise we’ll start with the following.

  1. Health and Well-being Perspective
  2. A Learning and Development Perspective
  3. A Relationship and Social Perspective
  4. A Personal and Career Perspective

Now, once we’ve established the core structure of our scorecard, the next step is to drill down deeper into each of our strategic areas to establish the key objectives along with some associated measurable goals.

Going back to our 4 key strategies, let’s first define an Objective for each.

Remember make sure the objective you use is both realistic and achievable. For this exercise we will insert the following:

  1. Health and Well-being Perspective
    1. Objective: Maintain and improve physical and mental well-being.
  1. A Learning and Development Perspective
    1. Objective: Continuously learn and grow intellectually and professionally.
  1. A Relationship and Social Perspective
    1. Objective: Cultivate and strengthen meaningful connections.
  1. And finally a Personal and Career Perspective
    1. Objective: Achieve personal and professional goals.

Remember, the objectives you establish should be realistic and achievable. Our goal is to build a balanced and holistic plan that is realistic and sustainable.

Now that we have our objectives defined, we can identify some associated measures or goal categories. A quick word of warning, don’t over-do it! I recommend we keep the goal categories to not more than four or five for each of our key strategies.

For example, let’s and the following types of Measures for each area.

 

  1. Health and Well-being Perspective
    1. Objective: Maintain and improve physical and mental well-being.
    2. Measures:
      1. Exercise
      2. Nutrition
      3. Sleep
      4. Mindset (Stress) Management
  1. A Learning and Development Perspective
    1. Objective: Continuously learn and grow intellectually and professionally.
    2. Measures:
      1. Reading
      2. Skills Development
      3. Networking
      4. Personal Projects
  1. A Relationship and Social Perspective
    1. Objective: Cultivate and strengthen meaningful connections.
    2. Measures:
      1. Quality Time
      2. Communication
      3. Acts of Kindness
      4. Social Engagement
  1. And finally a Personal and Career Perspective
    1. Objective: Achieve personal and professional goals.
    2. Measures:
      1. Progress
      2. Career Advancement
      3. Work-Life Balance
      4. Continuous Improvement

Alright. Now that we’ve identified our Measure categories, we can complete the lan by adding  actionable activities for each.

Again, the key here is to develop a balanced and realistic plan of action for each of our growth areas.

A sample is provided below.

  1. Learning and Development Perspective
    1. Objective: Continuously learn and grow intellectually and professionally.
    2. Measures:
      1. Reading
        1. new book per month
          1. (1) per month
        2. Diverse genres/topics explored
          1. Transformation, Spirituality, Content Creation, etc.

Adjust goals and measures as needed, perhaps monthly updates of accomplishments and quarterly adjustments to use this Personal Growth Scorecard as a guide for continuous improvement and holistic personal development.

I hope you found this article helpful in planning your personal growth plan for 2024!