The New Year has been welcomed, toasted, and celebrated. Now comes the hard part — the resolutions. Let’s make 2023 our year! To help, performance consultant Dr. Kimberley Amirault-Ryan shared some advice on goal setting and how to make achieving our goals more attainable.
Kimberley was the first female performance consultant for the New York Rangers, the New York Knicks, the Columbus Blue Jackets, and the Edmonton Oilers. She draws on her philosophy of embracing challenges and pushing boundaries to motivate even the highest of performers to achieve their fullest potential. Here’s her 2023 goal-setting advice:
- Move from Finite to Limitless Goals
Embrace a beginner’s mindset and reframe your goals from having a finite end to becoming limitless. Through each success, Kimberley said, high performers understand that there is always room to keep growing, improving, etc. “…limitless goals inspire them to stay hungry, curious, and motivated throughout their life,” she added. - Determine Your Why
Limitless goals are fueled by “why” — the real reason behind your desire to set and achieve your resolution. Move away from outside reasons and look inwards to find the “dream” behind the goal, Kimberley said. - Use Your “Why” to Push Forward
Once you understand your why, you can start on the prep work. Typically, Kimberley said, new habits are unavoidable while working towards a goal. It can take 66 days to develop a new habit, which is why resolutions are often left behind. Keeping the “dream” at the forefront of your goal helps overcome this obstacle. Kimberley recommends surrounding yourself with reminders and images of the dream to keep you motivated over the long term.
Each year, the most common resolutions fall under health and wellness, happiness, career, finances, and relationships. Below, we’ve asked some of our expert speakers to weigh in on these topics and share some simple strategies to help jump-start you on your way to achieving your 2023 resolutions.
Health and Wellness
Dr. Greg Wells
Expert on Optimizing Health, Wellness, and Peak Performance | Bestselling Author
Health and well-being are often top of mind for us at this time of year. I have a simple mindset shift that might help you make your new year’s resolutions a reality in 2023.
Start to think about your days as you do a year. Attach the same possibility to each day as you do every January of the new year, and in the evening, reflect and share gratitude as is often done every December.
Think about it. Each morning, there is a beautiful sunrise. We have time — today — to do our best work, to get in that movement, to be present with those we love, and to make that healthy meal and share it with family and friends.
When we take things one day at a time, we do our best on a daily basis. Our weeks become wonderful, we grow and adapt month after month, and our years become exponentially better.
By embracing this mindset and shortening our timeline down from 365 days to 1 day, we make resolutions actionable and achievable.
Dr. Greg Wells is a health and high performance expert who, as a scientist and physiologist, helps business leaders and their teams perform at the highest level, even when under the most extreme circumstances.
Dr. Susan Biali Haas
Expert in Burnout Prevention, Stress Management, and Resilience | Mental Health Advocate
Add more movement into your day. It’s one of the simplest, most powerful, evidence-based ways to improve virtually every aspect of your life. Any amount of movement makes a difference.
Exercise optimizes your brain. It boosts mood and can help treat (and reduce your chance of developing) mental health conditions like anxiety and depression. Moving regularly increases your energy, improves cognitive performance, and even creates new brain cells.
Incorporate both cardio and strength training into your week. One study on exercise and burnout found that 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise, three times a week, increased overall well-being, decreased psychological distress, made life feel less stressful, and reduced emotional exhaustion. They also reported that strength training produced similar results and can specifically increase your confidence and sense of accomplishment at work.
In 2023, find simple ways to get moving throughout your day. And when you do, notice how much better it makes everything feel.
An award-winning medical doctor, Dr. Susan Biali Haas helps audiences take control of their health and start living more impactful, meaningful lives. Her newest book, The Resilient Life, shares easy-to-apply, science-backed tips and strategies to break the cycle of overwhelm and restore joy, health, and meaning to your work and life.
Happiness
Dr. Robyne Hanley-Dafoe
Expert on Resiliency and Workplace Wellness
Do you want to be happier in 2023? Try being kind.
In the busyness of life, it is hard to make time for things that bring us happiness. Too often, pursuing happiness has a poor return on investment of time since life’s stressors can rob us of those happy feelings as soon as we turn on the news or open our email!
Instead of seeking happiness, my invitation is to practice being kind. Kindness is leaning into a deep trust that people are really trying their best. It is holding space that life is inherently hard, and people have varying degrees of capacity on how they show up. So, meet people with compassion and understanding, and maintain perspective.
Research shows that people who are kind are more satisfied with their personal and professional lives, have better physical and mental health, and have stronger relationships. From a neurological perspective, acts of kindness boost serotonin and dopamine, which are the neurotransmitters in our brains that give feelings of satisfaction and well-being and activate the pleasure/reward areas in the brain. Endorphins are also released, which serve as the body’s natural pain killer and help to ease stress and tension.
Ultimately, being kind to others and yourself, creates the ideal environment to feel those “good feeling” feelings, otherwise known as happiness.
An expert on resiliency and workplace wellness, Dr. Robyne Hanley-Dafoe’s transformative keynotes offer accessible and practical strategies to foster resiliency within ourselves and others. See her “kindness kick-starters” to help bring you more happiness in 2023.
Career
Shawn Kanungo
Strategy in a World of Disruption
Don’t get trapped with the fallacy of expertise, the world values the bold.
The more successful we were yesterday, and the more others congratulate us for that, the less willing we are to disrupt ourselves. You must pro-actively detach your identity from your status and previous tools. If you’re getting defensive about your ideas, then you’re slipping into the fallacy of expertise. Bold Ones are willing to constantly be the rookie and to listen to rookies. They’re willing to give up their expertise to embrace new mindsets, ideas, methodologies, tools, and tactics.
Shawn Kanungo is a globally recognized innovation and disruption strategist, who works at the intersection of creativity, business, and technology. He draws on his extensive experience to provide audiences with an optimistic roadmap for the future; one that embraces unexpected approaches to innovation to remain competitive and relevant.
Read more about becoming bold in Shawn’s new book The Bold Ones: Innovate and Disrupt to Become Truly Indispensable.
Finances
Preet Banerjee
Behavioural Finance Expert
One of the most effective ways to cut costs and save money in the new year is by conducting a subscription audit of your expenses. If you can find $83.33/month in reductions, that’s $1,000 in savings for the year.
Here’s how it works:
1) Make a list of all the subscriptions you currently pay for, including things like streaming services, software subscriptions, and any other automatic expenses.
2) Review the list and ask yourself, do you truly need and use each subscription? If the answer is no, consider cancelling or downgrading it.
3) If the answer is yes, do some comparison shopping to see if you can find a better deal. Check out competitors or alternative options to see if you can get the same or similar services for a lower price. You can also try negotiating with the company or reaching out to their customer service to see if they have any promotions or discounts available.
By following these steps, you can easily identify areas where you might be able to find savings and adjust your budget accordingly. So, give it a try and see how much you can save in the new year!
Originally trained as a neuroscientist, Preet Banerjee now excels within the world of finance. He inspires others to become financially empowered through his world-class expertise and unique ability to take the complexity out of money matters.
Relationships
Riaz Meghji
Human Connection Expert | Author of Every Conversation Counts
What’s a starting point for people to build deeper human connections? Embrace the power of a productive silence. What does this mean exactly? Feel their words, before you try and fix them.
Sometimes our desire to help someone has our own words inadvertently interrupting a productive silence that could have created a moment of meaningful connection.
For example, ask thought-provoking questions such as: What’s a big breakthrough you’ve had that taught you something about yourself? What are some life decisions you’ve made that you think I should know about? What’s a meaningful conversation that recently shifted your perspective?
Afterwards, embrace the silence as they ponder what’s important. It might feel awkward at first. However, the less you say, the more you allow them to open up and feel heard. This can ultimately deepen the rapport you have together.
Riaz Meghji is the bestselling author of Every Conversation Counts: The Five Habits of Human Connection That Build Extraordinary Relationships. An accomplished broadcaster with 17 years of television experience, he’s learned the power of a candid conversation and how to put it into practice.
