Crush your new years goals with these!

New year, new me — am I right?

There are some many ways to become a better person and achieve your goals.

In this article, I have attempted to sum up a few of the most common & best methods to improve yourself, your finances and your life.

Naturally, it’s not recommended to do ALL of them. Pick 1 or 2, focus on them until you become skilled & fluent.

If you try doing everything all at once, you’ll end up having done nothing at all. Trust me, I speak from experience.

1. Boost your Charisma

The simplest way to do this, is to make people feel important.

When you do this, it will automatically boost your charisma.

You can accomplish this by:

• Giving people eye contact
• Complement them
• Asking good questions
• Be interested, not interesting
• Follow up on things they said before (remember)
• Remember and say their names
• Recall something you discussed

This one isn’t easy. Practice, practice, practice.

2. Budgeting

Allocate your income to the following 3 buckets:

Needs, Wants and Savings.

Needs: 50%

• Housing
• Food
• Transportation
• Basic utilities
• Insurance

Wants: 30%

• Entertainment
• Travel
• Clothing & accessories

Savings: 20%

• Debt payments
• Emergency fund
• Retirement fund
• Investments

To do this, I have created a financial tracker for my self. If you’re interested, you can get it here.

3. Beat perfectionism

How to do this?

• Set yourself a deadline
• Produce your work & release it at the deadline
• Even if you’re not 100% satisfied with it

Use the 70–20–10 rule:

• 70% of your work will be “meh”
• 20% of your work will suck
• 10% of your work will be awesome

Remember: If you’re avoiding failure, you’re avoiding success.

It’s about volume. Get your products out there, this applies to many things:

• YouTube videos
• Print on Demand products
• Social media content
• Images, photographs
• Blog articles
• Podcasts
• Marketing emails
• …

Just get it out there and aim to improve every time a little bit.

4. Give an update (the right way)

“Powerful” people are busy.

They might not remember what they asked you to do.

So, use the following outline to give them an update:

• Here’s what you asked me to do
• Here’s what I did
• Here are risks / blockers (if any)
• If given more time, I’d do this…

This last point is important. It shows you’re willing to put in the extra effort, it shows you’re trying to add value.

Personally, I’ve been doing this in my IT job for the past year, and it lead me to a huge promotion & new function with a lot of responsibility within my firm.

My extra effort was noticed and rewarded.

5. Learn to say “No”

If you are reading this, you’re probably a person who wants to improve their life.

You probably set yourself some goals for the new year, right?

If you didn’t do this, I suggest you do.

Saying “Yes” to non-priorities ruins your own goals & priorities. Let me give you some examples:

• You’ve made it a resolution to start eating healthier
• You visit your family (or grandma) and she tries to stuff you with sweets.
• Learn to say “No thank you”.

Or another example:

• You’ve made a resolution to start & new side hustle and work on it every morning.
• Your friends want to go out & drink, smoke, party on Friday night, like they do every night. And usually, they party until the morning.
• Learn to say No. Or compromise and join for a short while, but tell them you need to leave early because you’ve got work in the morning.

If it doesn’t bring you closer to your goals, then it’s a NO (or perhaps a maybe, depending on the situation).

Can’t really tell my boss at work to “shove it”, can I? 😉

6. Your Body Language

Not many people may know this, but successful communication is mainly non-verbal.

That’s right.

People will like/dislike your speaking based on:

• 7% of what you say (words)
• 38% tonality & facial expressions
• 55% body language

Interesting right?

So:

• Stand up straight
• Pull your shoulders back
• Make eye contact
• Smile
• Give a firm handshake

Practice this at home.

Your posture is extremely important, not only for successful communication but also for your general health!

7. Learn from your mistakes

You can also call this self-reflection. You’ve probably heard about this.

So, after something happened, review it:

• What did I intend to accomplish?
• What actually happened?
• Why did it happen that way?
• What will I do next time? (for a better outcome or to repeat my success?)

Learning from your mistakes is what separates the best from the rest.

Personally, I have a small notebook (you can call it a diary), where at the end of the day, I write which actions I took today to accomplish my goals — or any other significant events that happened.

I reflect on them, see what I can do better next time (if needed).

8. Be more productive

There are many methods to be more productive, here are 2 that I use:

1. Defining a productive day

Here, write down a 3–3–3 plan for today:

• 3 hours on my most important project (today, in my case, that’s writing this article)
• 3 shorter tasks (in my case, that’s uploading 1 POD design to various websites — each website I consider as 1 task)
• 3 maintenance activities (for me that’s doing Wim Hof Breathing method, taking a 30 minutes walk and going to gym).

And it’s important to do this THE DAY BEFORE.

Why? Because today, I woke up with a clear plan in mind:

• I’m gonna wake up
• I’m gonna do Wim Hof breathing technique
• I eat my healthy breakfast (can also be counted as a maintenance activity)
• I start writing until 12
• I take a walk between 12–1PM and have lunch as well
• I work for my IT job in the afternoon (also a task)
• I upload my POD designs in the evening
• I go to gym around 7PM

Get the point?

2. Using the Pomodoro technique

This is a technique I use when working for longer periods of time.

Basically its:

• Work for 20 minutes without interruptions
• Have a 10 minute break.

Here’s a time on YouTube that you can use:

https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2FedEkd5ogzEI&display_name=YouTube&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DedEkd5ogzEI&image=http%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FedEkd5ogzEI%2Fhqdefault.jpg&key=a19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07&type=text%2Fhtml&schema=youtube

Thanks for reading!

If you’ve got questions or thoughts, drop them in the comments and I’ll get back to you! Follow or ???? if you’d like to see more content like this. Or buy me a coffee, this stuff is magical 😉

P.S. did you claim your copy of my free e-book yet?