Given the past two years, it might seem ludicrous to claim on 1/1/11 that 2011 is going to be a great year. On the one hand, many industries have been struggling and the historical drivers of new job creation (small business owners) are not exactly in a hiring mood given their company’s future uncertainty.
So how can I claim that 2011 is going to be a GREAT year…? The sheer power of positive thinking will create our own opportunities. For starters, let’s agree to replace the phrases “I CAN’T”, “I’ll TRY”, “I MIGHT” and “I HOPE TO” with “I WILL.”
We each deal with a psychological term called “head trash” in which research shows more than 65% of all the things we say to and about ourselves is NEGATIVE.
In order to break out of this two year slump our nation has been in, we need to all make a concerted effort to keep reminding ourselves how special we are and how much we each have to offer. It also requires a bit of reinvention nd VERY proactive changes be made.
We all need to remove those people from our network that serve as negative influences in our lives. Anyone (whether they be family or friend) that is a negative stimulus in our lives needs to be removed. We have the right to protect ourselves from these people that are always seeing the negative side of things, and/or trying to tell us what we cannot accomplish and remind us of our personal challenges. They are a cancer that needs to be removed before we can be free to rise up o our full potential.
We need to all make 2011 the year of significant action. It’s about figuring out what has been happening to our country the past few years and taking proactive steps to get our proverbial “house in order.” It’s about improving our family finances, improving our physical condition, improving our career situation, and positively impacting the lives of those we value most.
We will do that by setting realistic, tangible goals for ourselves on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual basis. Forget those silly New Year’s resolutions.
Instead, we will each develop our own personal marketing plan, create a job search pipeline, develop a list of key contacts to conduct informational interviews with, set goals on networking events, build an online presence through Facebook, LinkedIn, MeetUp and Twitter. Join relevant professional associations for the 2-3 industries you are interested in breaking into.
It means we all need to take classes, seek additional certifications and accreditations, learn a foreign language, investigate the industries we’d like to break into, seek out internships, offer to do volunteer work in your community, make key contacts, travel, work/study/live abroad, etc. Get going! Any action towards progress is desirable. We should all avoid the status quo and way we did things in the past! The one sure constant is change in 2011. Embrace it.
Dare to make 2011 GREAT and ignore all those negative people that want to focus on how bad things have been in the past.