The New Year is approaching and for many people this is the time to make their New Year’s resolutions and hope that the New Year will bring them a new life. In order to change your life you have to know first what you want to change and what to expect from your new life. Several studies about New Year’s resolutions showed the most popular wishes people make for the New Year. These include the following: Better financial position, lose the extra weight, find a better job, drink less alcohol, quit smoking, and manage stress better and life a more relaxing life. The chances are that your own new year’s resolutions fall into these categories. Below we outline some tips that can help you turn your resolutions into a reality.

1. Better financial position

The economic crisis has made this resolution the most popular. Unfortunately modern life is based on money and more and more people are concerned about their financial position and especially about their debts. If you can manage your debts better you will be able to enjoy a better life. Of course money is not the only factor for a happy life but it certainly helps a lot. One of the ways to manage your debts is to analyze your expenses and develop a budget to track your earnings and spending. A budget is the first step for understanding your true financial position. You will be able to see how much you earn and how much money you spend. You can start by creating a list of all your income sources. Then create a list of your standard expenses (rent, mortgage, loans, insurance etc).  Next add to the expenses list items that are not constant (shopping, bills, entertainment etc). Make sure that you write down all your expenses even those you think are not important (money spend for hair cut etc). Sum up your earnings and expenses and study the results. If your earnings are more then you can save some money or do a small investment, if the spending are more then you need to either find ways to increase your earnings (for example get a part-time job) or find ways to reduce your expenses. Put your expenses in order of priority and make sure that you can cover the basics (housing, food, health care, education) and think which ones can be reduced. This little exercise will certainly help you to understand your financial position better and plan next year based on your economic abilities. If you want you can also use a computer software or mobile software to help you maintain your budget all year long.

2. Lose weight

Weight loss is unfortunately among the most popular New Year’s resolutions. Almost 7 out of 10 people include weight loss in their list. This is because a large percentage of the population is overweight or obese. When you set your weight loss goals for next year you should have in mind that weight loss takes time and any attempt you make to lose weight must be done gradually and in a healthy way. For example if your goal is to lose 10 pounds then you should set a timeline of at least 9 months to achieve this. Do not expect that you can meet your weight loss goals from the first couple on months. If you do your weight loss with patience then at the end of the year you will be very happy that you managed to meet your weight loss resolutions. Some weight loss tips to follow are outlined below:

Drink water. At least 2 glasses of water per hour.

Eat red meat only once per week. Instead prefer fish (especially tuna) or poultry.

Avoid soft drinks and full fat daily products

Eat smaller food portions more frequently

Eat a good breakfast in the morning and a light lunch in the evening

Include a lot of fruits and green vegetables in your diet and as part of your meals

Start exercising for at least 20 minutes per day. Exercise may include walking or other form of cardio activity.

3. Find a better job

Many people wish that they find a better job next year. This is not very easy to achieve especially when the unemployment rates are rising and more and more people stay with out a job. It is not though impossible to achieve if you do it correctly. To make a career change you need to perform the following steps:

Find out what you want to do with your career. What kind of job you want to do and under what conditions.

Search the market and analyze if they are any opportunities available

Analysis your own skills and talents, find out your strengths and weakness

Think of ways on how to promote your strong points and hide your weak points

Make a plan of how to approach the career change and follow your plan until your goals are met

4. Drink less Alcohol

Alcoholism is an addiction that does not offer anything to anyone. On the contrary alcoholism creates problem to the health of people and to the way of life in general. If you believe that you fall in this category then move this New Year’s resolution on top of the list. It is very important to find ways to stop drinking than any other resolution. Believe in your self that you can quit this nasty habit and get some assistance to help you do it. Do not leave this continue for one more year, the quicker you get rid of alcohol from your life the better is for your health and life.

5. Quit Smoking

Besides the well known problems that smoking can cause there are a lot of people who are still smoking. These people wait for the New Year to quit smoking and make their effort. The good news is that a lot of people manage to stop smoking on New Year than any other period of the year. If you are still under the smoking addiction then the upcoming year is the best time to quit smoking for good.

6. Manage Stress

All the resolutions described above represent problems of every day life. These problems create another bigger problem: stress. Stress is a modern disease. Each and every person on the planet today suffers from stress in one way or another. A bit of stress is good because it can keep you alert and focus but most of the cases stress can create serious health problems. People who manage to control stress in their life are in position to enjoy a better, happier and healthier life. Stress is not easy to control but if you manage to do it the benefits are more than you can imagine. Some stress management and health tips include: proper time management, exercise, healthy diet, good sleep, and relaxation techniques, find a hobby.

7. Life a happier life

Another thing that many people wish is next year to be a happier year. Happiness assists people in enjoying the merits life has to offer. To find happiness in your life you have to search for it and win it. It is not difficult if you really want to live a happier life. Start appreciating what you have achieved so far in your life and be grateful about it. Get closer to people you love and trust, and start thinking positive about the future. Approach life from a different perspective and next year can be the best year of your life.

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One of the most common reasons that people don’t get to accomplish their goals is that we tend to get distracted, and we lose track of important things that need to be done consistently in order to move forward towards our goals. Maybe you have set a perfectly achievable goal and planned every detailed step, but without effectively tracking your goal and knowing your progress, most certainly you will get discouraged when the first obstacle gets in the way and end up giving up on your goal eventually.

To really achieve any goal worthwhile, we need to discipline ourselves to keep it on track until it’s accomplished. There are several ways to effectively track your goals.

1. Review your goals regularly, preferably daily

Keep yourself constantly reminded of your goals by reviewing them at a specific time each day. It can be in the morning, first thing after you get out of the bed. It can be at night just before you go to sleep. Write down all your goals in a notebook, or store them in a computer software. When you review them, envision how accomplishing that goal will make you feel. Check your current progress, understand what you did to move it forward, find out what else you still need to do. By doing this regularly, you train your mind to become alert to things that  are related to your goals, and gradually your mind will automatically guide you to do whatever needed to achieve them.

2. Break down a goal into actionable steps

Many people tend to easily get overwhelmed by all the things they need to do to accomplish a goal. The trick is to break down a bigger goal into smaller actionable steps. For example, say your goal is to start your own business. There are many things you will need to do. But before spending too much time on thinking about how difficult or time consuming they will be, first break things down a bit. For instance, obviously first few steps towards your goal could be: decide an overall direction or business model, find a right product/service to sell, list requirements to make this product/service work, etc. If any of these steps still looks big, break it down further. Once you break it down to doable steps, all you need to focus on is just one small step. As long as you keep doing these small steps, the completion of the goal will take care of itself.

3. Break down a goal into quantifiable results

For some goals, it may not be easy to know what exactly the steps are to get started. How are you still able to keep track of your progress? One method is to find a measurable aspect of your goal, and write it down as a number. For example, your goal could be to lose weight, then the number is your body weight. If you want to finish reading or studying a book, the number is the number of pages to read. If your goal is to save money for a dream vocation, the number is the amount of money you put in a bank account. As long as you know what this number is, you will always know your progress. All that’s left is just to keep doing things that help you move that number closer to your goal’s end result, and stop doing what doesn’t change the number.

4. Track a goal by the amount of time you spend on it

There are certain kind of goals that can’t be easily broken down to definitive steps. It is often difficult to find any obvious measurable aspects for their end result. They can be goals, such as, stay in shape, have a peaceful mind, become more fluent in a foreign language, etc. For this type of goals, you can try tracking the amount of time you spend on doing things required by them. For instance, to stay in shape, track how many hours you work out per week. For having a peaceful mind, track how much time you spend meditating, or doing yoga per day. For becoming fluent in a foreign language, track how much time you spend practicing speaking the language per day. So on and so forth.

No matter what type of goals you set, you should always find something to track its progress. The benefit of doing this is that you will always know whether you are making progress or not. If you are, you will feel encouraged and become confident that your goal is reachable. If you aren’t, you will know immediately that what you are doing isn’t working for you, and it isn’t moving you any closer to your goal. Then you adjust your plan and find something else to try, until you have found the right way to do things that will eventually achieve your goal.

Setting and achieving your goal shouldn’t be that hard once you have learnt how to effectively track your progress. All you need to remember is to review your goals regularly, break things down into manageable steps, make it measurable and finally track your time working on your goals. Once you have mastered to do these things, you can accomplish anything you want.

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Harry Che is an entrepreneur and experienced web developer. He runs a website called GoalsOnTrack.com, which is a personal goal setting and tracking software that helps many people accomplish their goals.
Visit http://www.goalsontrack.com to learn more how it can help you with your goals.

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For your personal and professional development and to achieve what you want in life and your career, it is certainly necessary to work hard. However, you can follow certain methods and tactics that can help you change your life and improve your career. These life hacks can drive you faster towards achieving your objectives. One of the most valuable but yet unused sources of information is other people in your personal and work environment. If you can manage to learn from other people and take advantage of what they have to offer, this will certainly help you achieve more both in your life and career.

Knowing and understanding your self better, the continuous expansion of knowledge, learning from your experiences, the application of what you have learned from the different experiences, will allow you to become day by day better than the previous day.

However, to achieve continuous personal improvement both in your life and career, you need to be concerned and give more importance to the people you meet, talk and work with every day. Every person, with whom you come in contact with, has something to offer you, if you allocate the necessary time and if you decide to listen and to observe carefully.

7 ways you can learn from other people and change your career and life are:

1. Diversity of thinking

It is true that as people we like to meet and be together with people who think the same way as we think. But is this always the best way for the further development of our horizons?

Probably not, because being with people who share our own perspectives in terms of perception and interpretation of the world, just strengthens what we believe and how we act.

But watching and listening carefully to other people we meet in our professional and personal environment, we can learn about new ways of thinking, interpretation and action. Careful analysis and comparison may give us valuable new understanding that can help us improve beyond the frontiers of our current capabilities.

2. The value of careful observation

Expand your ability to observe people. The careful observation of behaviour and modes of action may offer valuable information.

Look at your colleagues at work, observe how they handle their relations with others, and try to understand what methods they use to get results. You can then learn from them while you apply the successful methods, which they are using.

At the same time observe those who fail or are not effective. This will allow you to understand better what mistakes you should not make or avoid saving valuable time and energy.

3. Try to make new contacts

You should try and meet new people either through your daily work or a project that you participate. Your goal should be to know as many people as possible, to be known by as many people as possible and to develop networks of relationships. And do not forget the most important is not whom you know but who knows you.

4. Ask for the support and opinion of others

The perception other people in your family, personal or professional environment have for you is very important. These people are a key source for your self-assessment. Without self-assessment you cannot improve your career or change your life.

So look for their thoughts in a way that is constructive and objective and do not get defensive. Your goal here is to adjust your behaviour, how you work, in order to improve your efficiency and to develop new modes of action.

If you apply this technique of finding out what others thing about you, you can also have a longitudinal assessment of your improvement in several areas.

5. Understand and appreciate the importance of networks

It is a fact that successful people develop strong networks of relationships. Remember that the good and strong networks of human relations are a difficult, time consuming, tedious and lengthy task. It requires hard work, resources, commitment and attention to human factors and sensitivities.

The successful relationship networks operate in both directions and provide invaluable services in many situations of personal and professional life.

6. Build relationships with colleagues and superiors

All of us in our work learn from our colleagues and our managers. It is a normal situation and thus it is necessary to strive to cultivate interpersonal relationships that will allow us to extract the maximum from the knowledge, experience and wisdom of the people with whom we work and co-operate daily.

It is of enormous importance for your personal growth and successful career, to learn as much as possible from the people you encounter in your lives. You must learn to learn from people. It is not an easy task to do. It is an art that can be mastered by patience, strategy and practice.

The search for new ways of thinking, understanding new concepts, the careful observation of behaviour, the self-assessment across the perception of others, the development of networks are offering you wealth from the people you encounter every day. It is up to you to recognize, use and appreciate it.

7. Use other people as a source of inspiration

The enthusiasm of people who have achieved their objectives, are very important for you to maintain your own enthusiasm at high levels. A big step for changing your live and improving your career is to manage and treat successful people not competitive but see them as examples and as sources of knowledge that will help your achieve your own goals and objectives. The biggest mistake is to think that nobody has to offer you anything and that you know everything. Those who have already achieved something they are done something better, so you should learn from them and try to improve your defects.

It is also a known fact that people who surround you in your personal or work environment can unconsciously or consciously drive you to failure. This can happen if you are dealing with people that think negatively. These people are not trying to achieve anything and they blame everything and everyone for their own failures. Such people can simply discourage you and psychologically can remove all your positive power.

On the contrary, if you are working with optimistic and people who think positive, people who always look on the positive side of life and encourage you, then your goals can be achieved more easily and they can help you on how to be successful in life. These kinds of people, the positive thinkers, can help you change your life for the better and achieve both your personal and career goals.

As a final advice, try not to share your plans, goals and your dreams with the wrong people because you can end up very disappointed because of their cynicism and attitude. Share your objectives and goals with people who understand, care and support you. These people are either your close friends and family or other people who have similar goals with you. With these people you can exchange experiences and knowledge and support each other even in moments of weakness or difficulty.

image source: durango

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