achieve your new year’s intention

Set and Achieve Your New Year’s Intention or Goal

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Every year I recommend reviewing your previous year and setting plans for the New Year using my Year in Review Planning Worksheet. This makes it easier to go through the process and put your intentions in writing.


I am using the word intention this year as I feel that if you have one key intention and you keep focus on that, then life will help you move towards that in ways you did not dream of. I find this to be true for me and I became more aware of this notion after reading the book The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer.


In his book Michael tells his story of how life kept asking him to do things that seemed contrary to his intentions but ultimately led him on a path of self-discovery and success.


I realized that in the past I have forced myself to do things to achieve my goals that did not always feel right. Sometimes these were ideas or practices that other people recommended and worked for them but did not work for me. However, when I trusted in life and let myself be guided by my intuition, emotions and thoughts in a balanced way, things worked out better with less stress.


When I speak about surrendering to life as Michael does in his book, it is about letting go of our narrow thinking based on our personality type and our past conditioning and being open to new paths.


I was reading an article about health in this month’s Costco Connection magazine and the author was suggesting a few things that I am already doing or have done. For brain health he suggested exploring your world and discover your environment, so you see things from new perspectives. He also suggested joining or starting a club such as hiking, getting to know your neighbours and getting a dog to stay more actives.


A long time ago I had set intentions to be healthier and both consciously and unconsciously I had done all the above suggestions. Just following my intuition and what life put in front of me has paid off. In fact, joining a local cycling club had me meet my current partner who shares many of my interests and we have been happily together for about 12 years now.


It seems for some especially logical types that trusting life is casting faith to the wind. Yet unconsciously we have trusted life since birth. Breathing is an act we all due every moment to be alive yet is not something we think about logically. We just trust that each breath will come and along with-it life. Yet though there is a logical explanation to how all this works in terms of our physiology, there is definitely something very powerful and almost mysterious going on.


In summary, you can download and complete my Year in Review Planning worksheet that helps you to review your previous year and plan for the new one, or simply set a life enhancing intention and trust that life will bring you what you need to fulfill it. Practice being open to new opportunities that life will present.


Happy New Year!


goal planning

Taking a First Step is the Key to Achieving Your Goals

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To achieve any goal, you need to act. Without action nothing will happen no matter how much you will or pray for it to happen. Many people may tell you otherwise but that is just deception.


Most everyone realizes that to achieve a worthwhile goal action is required yet often the first step is never taken. I always recommend writing down your goal and thinking it through and for that reason I make available my free goal planning worksheet.


Many things can stand in the way of acting on a goal and they can be both internal and external factors. Internal factors are things like fear of failure, lack of self-confidence, low self-esteem, lack of motivation and procrastination. External factors can be lack of know-how, lack of resources and other factors depending on the goal.


I have an important goal to publish a new online training on knowing yourself using a types of people approach that was developed by Fritz Glaus and explained in his book CrazyZoo, Know-Thyself Made Easy! This training is part of a larger training on a process to manage employee performance.


I found myself procrastinating on working on the course creation and I was becoming more and more down on myself because of this. I realized that I needed to break down my goal into extremely small action steps and have a daily plan for these steps.


I also realized I need support and help for some of the design tasks that I am not fully skilled for. I found myself projecting the workload into something bigger than it was and this stopped me from acting as I feared I would not be able to do other tasks that are important and that I enjoy more.


Imagine someone who has friends that run marathons and this person always feels left out. She wants to be able to join the events but hardly exercises. She knows that being active would greatly improve her health. But just the thought of running a marathon seemed impossible.


The first step for someone like this could be to go out and buy a good pair of running shoes. The next step could be walking briskly for 30 minutes every day or 2nd day. The next step could be to increase the walking time and gradually start a slow job and then increasing the pace, and so on. As each new step is taken benefits start to be experienced and confidence and skills grow. There is a well-known quote from John Bytheway, “Inch by inch, life’s a cinch. Yard by yard, life’s hard”. I find this to be true, yet many people seem to focus on the big steps and never start acting towards their goal.


goal planning

My goal planning worksheet walks you through each step of the goal achievement process and the obstacles to solutions section is where you then create your action steps. If you are procrastinating on your goal use this worksheet and when you get to writing down actions, break them into ridiculously small steps if necessary for you to take action, and then progressively go to each next step.


Actions and small steps make goal achievement easier and if your goals are worthwhile then take action now and start with the first little step.


happy people

Proof that Happy People are More Productive and Motivated!

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I recently watched the documentary film Happy People; A Year in the Taiga, and this was proof positive that happy people are better at what they do and more productive.


You can also say from watching this film that the reverse is true, people who are good at and love what they do are happier.


The people featured in Happy People; A Year in the Taiga live in the Siberian taiga. It focuses on Russian trappers who live off hunting for fur animals such as the prized sable.


The conditions where they live, and hunt are brutal with temperatures in winter falling below minus 50 degrees. But this does not deter them from doing their work with minimal modern equipment, such as a chain saw and at times a snowmobile.


My living conditions compared to the Happy People is luxurious as is my colleagues and friends. Yet are never heard the people in the film complain, whereas every day I find something to holler about.


I realized that even though the conditions are so harsh in this part of Siberia the people love their lives and what they do. They obviously love nature and working physically. They enjoy being challenged and finding solutions. They relish in being self-sufficient.


A good part of the work I do is helping clients make better decisions when selecting new employees. I do this using a psychometric assessment tool, the PXT Select. This assessment has a section on occupational interests that are based on John Holland’s RIASEC classification for occupational interests.


The PXT Select defines these as Enterprising, Creative, People, Technical, Financial/Administrative and Mechanical. It then measures the person’s top three interests and matches them to a performance model for the job. Each performance model prioritizes three top interests that are essential for job satisfaction.


The people profiled in the film obviously must have mechanical as their top interest, perhaps followed by creative and enterprising. I say this because they need to enjoy being creative in the face of danger, harsh conditions, and unpredictable situations. They also need to be enterprising to be able to run their business of trapping animals and then selling them for the most money they can get.


I know my top three interests are creative, people and enterprising and that is why I enjoy making videos as part of my business endeavours to help people with my expertise. I also know that financial/administrative is probably my lowest interest area and I tend to avoid related tasks, which can sometimes cause me problems.


I once read that over 40% of people hold jobs in fields they did not study for. They probably discovered they enjoyed something else and found a way to learn what they needed to.


The key point here is to make sure you hire and promote people who not only are skilled at the job but are passionate about the work. The best way to find out their key interests quickly is to use an assessment like the PXT Select. Otherwise, there is a good chance you are leaving it up to guesswork.


training needs

How to Conduct a Training Needs Analysis to Determine Training Needs of Employees

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It is crucial to conduct a training needs analysis to determine the training needs of employees. To perform this properly and ensure positive results from the training there are certain steps to follow.


Achieving positive results from employee training means that employees improve their performance on the job. A training needs analysis helps you plan the training program and focus on the specific needs of each employee.


It also builds mutual understanding between employees and management on what training will do to help them be more productive in their job. Training and development is an important resource for everyone today as it helps stay productive in an ever changing workplace and adds to the marketing potential of a person when looking to change jobs.


training needs

To help you conduct your own training needs analysis I have created a worksheet containing columns for levels of importance, performance factors and levels of achievement.


This may sound like a performance appraisal, but it is a training and development tool and needs to be treated that way. The conversation with employees when using this tool is to be on improvement not on evaluation. Watch the video to see me explain how to use this worksheet in detail. I make reference to another video on the responsibilities of a manager, in which I list specific job skills associating with managing and supervising employees.


My training needs analysis worksheet has the managerial skills already loaded as performance factors and there is another tab in the Excel worksheet that is a template with the performance factor column left blank.


I have also created a questionnaire in Word to go along with the Excel worksheet. This document contains questions to have the employee answer as part of the needs’ analysis process. This helps you to focus in on what the employee needs to improve and discuss what that skill improvement would look like when applied on the job. You can download these documents through this link.