5 Ways to Make 2015 Your Best Year Yet

1) Breathe.

I watch (and this year am going to finally participate in) a LOT of sports. I also work a LOT which should be considered a brain sport as I'm always solving problems, but unfortunately, people don't think of work as a sport (I claim they should). One of the keys I've observed in the athletes that really excel and those that don't is the ability to breathe through stressful moments. High performers breathe through the belly and often use both nose and mouth to optimize their oxygen intake and then really release the air along with the toxins of stress.

If you work in associations, you have stress. Like a sports team, there's a lot of people to work with that requires compromise, negotiation and unification. That's stressful. As a consultant to associations, I typically work with multiple departments at one time and closely observe the dynamics between people as that's truly the key to understanding whether a marketing campaign, technology project or total rebranding initiative is going to be successful. The typical posture I encounter is shoulders up, belly out, back slouched and shallow breathing. Hands, jaw and neck are clenched which literally is holding in the toxins and stopping you physically from being able to change. 

Breathe.

Reset.

Breathing allows you the opportunity to let go of the negativity and reset your mind to ask new questions such as "what if this new project/thing/website/integration/benefit went right?". Breathing allows you to work through the emotion and get to the job at hand. Breathing resets your posture and your mind so that you can be open.

Breathe more in 2015 and see how it improves your performance.

2) Experience Info Inputs that Aren't Your Choices.

What? Exactly. Each of us is inundated with information each day. What we choose to let trickle in, what we focus on, what we deem important is all based on our predilections, past experiences, and world view. Unless you are marketing to people that are exactly like yourself, your opinion doesn't matter. You will never be a successful marketer if you can't get out of yourself.

Be your target market.

If you're going to attract Millennials than you better understand the difference between what a 17 year old is experiencing and a 25 year old, How a 20 year old is different than a 26 year old. Do we guess and base it on how we remember being/feeling/acting at that age? No! That's the kiss of death because the entire cultural context has changed and a target market must be studied in it's real-time context.

While you can't literally get into the minds of your target markets, you can experience where they are getting their information. Read the same stuff, listen to what they're listening to, walk into the stores in which they shop, download the same apps. 

Observe.

Scientific observation strives to eliminate bias so observe without an agenda. Don't analyze right off the bat to try and understand from your viewpoint. 

Just be.

3) Stop hiding.

A lot of us in the association world are hacks when it comes to technology and all things digital. We sorta know what we're doing with a computer, HTML and mobile, but wouldn't want to have to put our know-how to the test. Maybe we entered the workforce before laptops and maybe we went through college with typewriters--whatever the case, the truth is that the vast majority of us haven't been adequately trained or educated in technology and how it fits into our subject matter area of expertise. 

This has led to decades of fear and hiding. We got a lot of posers in the association world. 

A lot of the people who say they're technical, are no longer considered technical in today's world. A lot of people in charge don't know what being technical means in today's world and can't properly identify, evaluate or manage technical people.

Let's stop the hiding in 2015 and rid ourselves of the fear of not knowing. Nothing good comes from hiding as anyone knows who works with a department head that uses hiding as a management principle. Let's call out our areas of spotty knowledge and come up with a plan to get the education we need.

It feels so good to let go of fear and just admit that you don't know what something is, but you are confident that you can learn what it's about.

Let's get real in 2015 and get a plan for improvement.

4) Chunk it Down.

Everyone is overwhelmed. There's just too much of everything and no way to do it all. The difference in achieving goals is found in the ability to cope with one's environment and stay focused. The natural human response to big goals, big projects, big anything is to freeze. What is typically seen in organizations is that all systems automatically shut down because the Big Thing seems very Scary and Impossible. 

Chunk it Down.

Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAG) are a common corporate strategy planning tool that gets organizations to focus on a big, seemingly impossible goal to meet. Maybe your BHAG is that every time someone brushes their teeth, they will silently thank the American Dental Association. That's Big. If we were to say ok, now go do that, you might start hyperventilating because it's overwhelming.

How do you fight being overwhelmed? You break down the Big Thing into bite-size chunks. You breathe. You put aside fear and any other emotional reaction that is on the fight-or-flight response path. You pick up one chunk and you work on it until it's solved.

Celebrate the chunk that you solved!

Pick up the next chunk and get going. Be dogged in your determination to solve the chunk at hand.Keep solving chunk by chunk. You build confidence each time you finish a chunk. Confidence in your ability to solve problems is perhaps the biggest key to happiness in 2015. You may not know the topic at hand, but having confidence in your ability to solve problems and learn will provide you with the positive attitude needed to be successful.

5) Have Fun because Work is a Sport.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has a commercial which basically says that the vast majority of student athletes become professionals in a field of study that is not a sport. If you study former NCAA athletes in the workplace, you will find that the majority of them are highly successful.

It's all about the mindset of "work".

Athletes have a common understanding of the need to Do Work. They get that downtime is prep time. How you practice is how you perform. It's not luck, it's not magic, it's nothing but work. The point of work is to perform. Game time is where all that practice gets tested and you get the opportunity to test out your progress and see what's going right and what needs improvement. The ability to compete and understand how you're performing is fun!

Performing is fun.

That's the mindset that successful organizations have as a collective unit. The ability to perform under pressure, in a competitive environment with an undetermined outcome is where confidence, camaraderie and character are born.

Are you competing? Are you competitive?

These are 2 key questions that every individual and organization should ask itself. Do you have it linked up in your head that competing is fun? Do you have it linked up in your head that getting feedback from members, attendees, Google Analytics is fun? Do you find getting measured fun?

The last key to happiness in 2015 is to link up work and fun. In our world where we can increasingly measure everything, we need to connect these two concepts. If we shy away from competition and measurement, we will hide, get overwhelmed, shut down, freeze.

As a consultant to many associations, this is my #1 observation between the differences in association and corporations: the ability to see work as a sport and play it in a way that is fun. Fun doesn't always mean winning. This isn't everyone gets a trophy every time. The fun of sport is in competing. There's nothing more powerful than a "good" loss--it's what improves your game. There's nothing worse to an athlete than an "easy win" because it doesn't get you better. 

Work is a sport. Have fun with it in 2015. 

Best wishes for making this your best year yet.