Charlie Kirk, Shabbat, and the Secret of Jewish Survival
5 min read
A three-step practical guide to change.
How a few moments can supercharge your new year.
With Yom Kippur around the corner, here’s a short guide to help you reflect on your goals and what to change in order to supercharge the new year with connection and growth.
Find a time and space where you can disconnect from your routine and take a deep breath and relax. Abraham Lincoln once said, “Give me six hours to cut down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
In the same sense, don’t rush into this. Take few minutes to breathe and relax. Enjoy yourself. It’s critical to be in the right state of mind for this exercise.
When you open Waze to put in directions, the most important step is to make sure that it knows where you are. Without your proper beginning coordinates, it doesn’t matter where you want to go, you won’t be able to get there. Similarly, when it comes to personal growth, before you start thinking about where you want to be, it’s essential to come to terms with where you are starting.
Ask yourself:
To think about where you want to be, ask yourself the following questions.
These are big questions, and the default assumption is that they require massive action. This is not true, and that assumption can be harmful towards achieving your goals.
By now, you’ve laid out where you are and where you’d like to be. The next step is to identify goals and micro goals that will slowly take you towards your destination. It’s the small steps taken slowly over a long period of time that truly get you to where you want to be.
Here are a few principles that can be followed to maximize your chances of success.
Big goals are scary and overwhelming. Start by picking just one goal from your list. Once you have it, it’s time to split it into micro goals. If you are aiming to change all of your ways in a week, none of this is realistic. But if you have an entire year, you have plenty of time to slowly work towards your goals. For example, to become a better listener in a week is very difficult, but to listen more attentively in one conversation a day for a year is a very attainable goal which will compound to make you a better listener over a year’s worth of time.
Accountability is the hardest step. It’s one thing to get excited, it’s another to set up a system which will not allow you to fall through the cracks. Statistics show that having an accountability partner raises the chance of you meeting your goals to up to 95%. That is, if you are truly committed to change. If you want this, you’re going to have to work for it. It’s simple, but it’s not easy. Having a friend, a spouse, a coworker, or a coach along with you for the ride and holding you accountable is one of the most important steps in following through with your goals. It’s not comfortable to be accountable to someone, but it is possibly the only way to ensure that you will meet your goals in the way that you want to.
Think deeply about the one area that you’d like to see a change in this year. Focus in specifically on one character trait or behavior within that larger theme and make it a priority to work on it. If you try to change everything, you may end up empty handed. But if you focus on one thing, next year, you may find that the struggles that you have with that one specific challenge have diminished greatly.
Wishing you the best of luck, and a wonderful and blessed new year. And don’t lose sight of your inner greatness which God has bestowed upon you. The process of teshuva should be positive and uplifting, not a time to berate yourself and get down.
Great article, thank you!
Wow! Excellent article. I have read many articles that deal with this, most of them longer and more daunting to implement. This really breaks it down to a more manageable way to see where we are and what areas need work. The questions to ask ourselves are to the point and right on target. Yasher koach!