5 Strategies to Make 2021 Your Breakthrough Year
We’ve all heard enough about 2020, right? Time to pivot and focus on making 2021 your breakthrough year. Let’s remember the silver linings from 2020 – the freedom of remote working and no daily commute, athleisure wear, connecting with co-workers on a more personal level (meeting their kids and pets during virtual meetings), etc. – and forget all the challenges and negative things that occurred. Focus forward, focus strategically, and take action! Here are five strategies from Creating Your Success Plan (CYSP) to help get you kick-started.
Create a 2021 (and beyond) strategic plan for your career.
We participate in annual planning for our employers, so why not ourselves? First, take time to think deeply about what matters most to you in your professional life. What are your core values? How can you use them to live your life more intentionally in 2021? What do you want to achieve in your career this year? Make a list of three to five accomplishments that would make 2021 your breakthrough year. Consider how the challenges of 2020 might have delayed or set you back, then empower yourself to move forward with focus and inspiration to take charge this year!
Set tangible stretch goals to achieve the success you seek.
Your goals should support what you want to achieve. Make them doable, yet also a little challenging, and try to include metrics of success. It’s important to identify what success looks like for each goal. Work toward creating two to three goals for each accomplishment you have identified. Think about what achieving each goal will mean for your path forward to your breakthrough year.
Keep your goals top of mind and visualize frequently.
It’s easy to set goals, put them aside and go back to autopiloting through your life. Don’t do that! Instead, keep your goals close by and review them regularly – several times a week if possible. Then visualize how it will feel when you achieve them, one by one, by the end of 2021. This process can be very motivating and energizing, so I suggest you do it as often as possible. The better you can see and feel your accomplishments through visualization, the more quickly and surely you will get there.
Find a support system to keep you motivated and accountable.
If you don’t already have one, find a mentor to help provide guidance to reach your goals. Remember that a mentor can be helpful at every stage of you career, and you can offer mentorship to others, as well! Consider investing in career coaching for guidance and an extra layer of motivation and accountability. Find an online community designed to connect like-minded women for support and success resources. The CYSP system provides these resources and could be a great place to start connecting and learning.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, get really clear that you deserve success…and go for it.
Sometimes limiting beliefs, fear of failure, or trying to do things perfectly keep us from moving forward toward our goals. Limiting beliefs are often hiding deep inside and we don’t even know they’re holding us back. A big one many people have is the belief that they don’t really deserve to be successful. Fearing failure can keep us from moving forward. Instead of fearing it, embrace the possibility of failing, because that’s where we learn the most! As women, we feel a lot of pressure to be perfect. And that can be paralyzing when we’re trying to grow and advance in our careers. Consider whether any of this has held you back in the past and make a promise to yourself to push past it. Success is waiting for you on the other side!
If you take the time to put all of this into play for your career and stay motivated to achieve your goals, I’ve no doubt 2021 will be your breakthrough year! As you work through these steps, I’d love to hear what’s working and what might be a struggle. I offer different coaching packages to help women get started on creating a success plan for their careers. If you’re interested, let’s have a 30-minute free consultation call to talk about it. Here’s to your success, always!
This guest post was authored by Janice Lamy:
Janice is an accomplished marketing professional with more than thirty years of experience leading successful healthcare marketing programs and mentoring young professionals. She is keenly interested in positively impacting a generation of women by providing career success guidance through her book, Creating Your Success Plan: A Career Success Guide for Women, and online resources. She sees a convergence of activity from many sources coming together to address the disparities between women and men in leadership roles. By helping women create their Success Plans, her intention is to contribute to that movement in a meaningful way.
