Thankfully it’s all over!

Christmas and New Year that is.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy it. Like my friend Sophie says, “ what is there not to enjoy? You get to eat what you want, watch movies, drink unacceptable amounts of alcohol and share presents. All from the sofa!”

I agree, it’s fun whilst it lasts. But eventually, like the second the New Year hangover has dissipated, it all becomes a little too normal, a little too mediocre. And as any of my clients will know, ‘mediocre’ is my least favourite word when applied to self.

I guess for many people, Christmas and NY are just slightly ramped up versions of their normal lives. Eating crappy food, drinking alcohol every day and sitting on the sofa doing very little with their time.

Simply my ideal of living hell!

Fair enough, I may lean somewhat towards the extreme end of wanting to squeeze every last drop of action, out of my life, never really stopping until I hit the sack.  But stats from the Office for National statistics state that the average UK person watches TV for roughly three hours a day. Three hours! That’s compared to one and a half hours of time spent socialising or taking part in cultural experiences; roughly twenty three minutes a day is spent reading (unless you are like my own forty five year old uncle who has never – no never –read a book in his entire life), thirty minutes or so is spent on hobbies and get this (well I’m shocked at least) the average male spends less than thirteen minutes a day and the average female, less than seven minutes on sport or exercise!

Jesus, is it any surprise that over a quarter of all adults in the UK are classified as obese!?

But I diverge. The reason that I am really glad that we are back in to the New Year and in particular the first working day, is that I get to start acting upon the goals that I have for 2010. Let me be clear, I’m not talking resolutions, as I think we all know how un-empowering they can be. No, I’m talking about the action plan that I have for my life this year and beyond. What I aspire to do, learn, see, experience, taste and maybe even have.

Here’s my prioritised list:

Spend more time making the journey from London to Bristol to see my family and friends.

Write a set of mini coaching books.

Make a successful coaching show for TV (Bean and I are filming a pilot next month, so watch this space).

Run the first ever NLP course for personal trainers (May, in London if you’re a PT and  interested ? )

Run a six-day health and wellness workshop in Majorca that pulls together all of the latest functional medicine and NLP methods, all under one sunny sky.

Take on at least six new small business’ in need of overhaul or taking to the next level.

Train consistently in the gym, four times a week until May (when I begin climbing outside a lot more) and get down to 8% body fat at fourteen stone.

Learn to break dance using NLP modelling techniques.

Learn Golf using NLP modeling techniques.

Get my Motorbike license and buy a Ducati.

Start taking flying lessons for light aircraft.

Take acting lessons, just for the hell of it! (I’m enrolled for all of February in a method acting workshop).

Free climb a 3000ft rock climb in Yosemite valley – called ‘Free Rider’ with my best friend Ade Baxter.

Learn Spanish.

You may have noticed that none of these goals are written in the negative sense, such as ‘give up X’ or ‘stop doing Y’. They are all stated in the positive and based upon my my own check-in on what I can realistically expect from the time i know that i have available. All of my goals are also highly achievable so as to keep my momentum going.

In NLP we have a common set of guidelines for achieving goals and it’s called ‘well formed outcomes’. We also pair it up with a set of success principles.

I will write in detail about these principles and how to utilize them to achieve any goal in the next couple of weeks.

After all, one key point to achieving your desired outcome is to have the discipline to know when to stop doing one thing and to go do another. It’s 16.32 and I said I would leave for gym two minutes ago…

(My favourite easy tip for really getting things done. We’ve not owned a TV in four years!)