Everyone loves making New Year’s resolutions, and if you stick to your plan for more than a few weeks, you get the admiration of all your friends. Most new year’s resolutions go unfulfilled, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be striving to improve. We just need to set realistic goals and give ourselves the motivation to achieve them.
Are You Improving Personally or Professionally?
It’s very easy to get comfortable in a job. If you enjoy what you do, like the people around you, and get paid a decent amount to do it, it feels like you could stay in your position forever. But being complacent is very dangerous, because while the longer you do one thing, the better you get at it, you’re not really growing.
Life gets boring if we do the same thing every day. Eventually we have to move on to a new challenge. Having things too easy is fun for awhile but eventually you’re likely to want to grow personally and professionally. This is one of the reasons that retirement sounds great but kind of boring for some people once they get there. Having no responsibilities sounds great until you realize that there’s nothing motivating you anymore.
When things are the same every day, we lose our creativity. Even with this blog, I write about my experiences and what I learn from them. When things get boring and every financial transaction is the same, it gets harder to think of ideas. When things go wrong and I learn about new topics, it opens up all sorts of new ideas that I can write about.
I’m Challenging Myself to Get a Professional Designation
Over the next 6 weeks (a self-imposed deadline), I will be training for and completing the Google Adwords certification. I do a lot of PPC management in my day job, and this seems like a natural step. It’s a challenge I can take on to improve professionally as it will help me in my current position and make me more valuable to my company.
I enjoy learning new systems and I’m hopeful that what I learn will open me up to new ideas that will improve my work and open up some creativity that will help my company. The more you learn, the more you grow. And when you grow, you open yourself up to many more ideas and opportunities.
How do you keep things new and fresh? What are the benefits?
I like where I am professionally, so this year is about working on myself personally. I’m actively being more forgiving, am attempting to handle stress without freaking out, and am on Weight Watchers Online again to lose 15-17 pounds…down 6 so far.