• You are the one and only true leader of your life
• You can claim your power and focus your energy to create a unique purpose and aim in 2008
• The result will be unimaginable

The New Year marks a time of hope, anticipation and renewal for many. Yet, New Year’s resolutions are often made up goals to fix some deficiency or flaw you identify in yourself, like losing weight or reducing debt.

The root word of resolution is “resolve” which means to analyze, breakdown, dissect, and decompose. So I’d like to take a moment to do just that regarding traditional goal setting.

What if your resolution were to not change something on the outside but to alter your way of being on the inside? This would allow you to express your unique purpose and aim to lead the life you truly want in 2008.

I begin the Inventive Roost Lesson, in Chapter 5 of my book, U.N.I.Q.U.E.: Growing the Leader Within with a quote by John F. Kennedy, “Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.”

When you are stuck in a pattern of trying to succeed in order to obtain happiness, satisfaction, and fulfillment, you often fail to see new opportunities and enjoy the experience of being a leader. A Leadership Garden in a survival condition, constantly eroded by automatic emotional reactions and responses, keeps you from inventing your purpose or expanding your life toward fulfillment.

The irony of your automatic survival condition is you are born, you live, and you die - no exceptions. This makes survival only a temporary state of an unachievable outcome. Survival diverts your attention from the ultimate aim to experience joy and happiness with the time you do have on earth.

When you realize that life is not just about you, but the difference you make both positive or negative, the true opportunity of being the one and only true leader of your life becomes real.

So let’s dissect for a moment a common resolution to shed those unwanted pounds. You resolve to start the year with regular exercise and to eat right. If you are like most people, you wait until after New Year’s Day. You wake up on January 2nd, put on your sweats, slip into your walking shoes, and head out the door for your first brisk walk. It is challenging, but you are proud you did it.

You stick to this routine for a few weeks but slowly your enthusiasm wanes when the results are not’t happening fast enough. Before you know it, your resolve disappears and you quit. You wonder, what happened? Are you just weak willed and doomed to be fat? No!

You took what I call the doing path of traditional goal setting from the outside in. Let me explain how this works. When you focus on action first to achieve a result, you delay the experience you want until the result is achieved.

But what if you could accept delayed results, stay in action, and still have the experience of satisfaction and joy throughout the process?

By growing your Leadership Garden with purpose and aim you can. You scramble who you A.R.E. to create a new way of being human and setting goals.

It begins with the experience you want now. Inside that experience you determine the actions to take to achieve the results you desire. This creates a synergy of behaviors that make up your unique leadership, like an artistic design with rhythm and balance. You can use the E.A.R.S. (experience, actions, and results with synergy) chart in the Chapter 5 exercise of my book to create your purpose and aim. This becomes your guide for goal setting and the results you want to achieve.

With your E.A.R.S tuned in, you listen for and take actions consistent with what you desire. Sustainable change takes place from the inside out with satisfaction throughout the process.

If you think about it, if you were happy right now about just being alive and the difference you make in the world, you might be exercising and eating right. So the root of the problem is not the lack of exercise, the amount of food intake, or better discipline, as much as a lack of direction for your overall experience of life with a focus on the difference you want to make.

The pursuit of fitness, wealth, or fame for only yourself, absent a personal purpose and aim, can leave you empty inside no matter how much you accomplish.

On the other hand, the experience of life with a unique purpose and aim is a powerful motivator of action and provides you the internal fortitude to overcome obstacles and set-backs that you may encounter. The primary goal becomes to learn, grow, and thrive on the journey to fulfill your unique life purpose and aim. Tasks that once appeared as a chore turn into joy inside of this thriving leadership condition.

So what will you create for 2008 and how will your goals be a reflection of your unique purpose and aim?

I would love to hear what you create and the result you achieve throughout the year.