Data shows that about 25% of people make New Year’s Resolutions, and the majority think they’ll accomplish them.
Even if you don’t keep them, setting resolutions can help you improve in different aspects of your life, as well as increasing hope and optimism. When you seek to do better or be better, you tend to inspire others as well.
Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz may be most famous for coaching his team to nine straight New Year’s Day bowl games. Or maybe you remember him for that undefeated national championship season in 1988.
While several of us at Central States Marketing are big Notre Dame fans, it’s something that Lou did OFF the field that is inspiring us this year. Lou encouraged his players to adopt a W.I.N mentality in their daily lives and we’ve chosen that philosophy as our touch stone for 2023.
W.I.N. is a simple acronym that the famous coach used to remind his players to consider “What’s Important Now.” We can’t think of a better time than the start of a new year to ask ourselves that question—whether in regards to our personal lives or our business strategy. It’s so easy to operate on auto-pilot and move through life without paying attention to the scenery. We train ourselves to get through the day-to-day chaos of this world by developing routines and responses that require little thought. We set the alarm for the same time each day, we order the same coffee, we gather information from the same sources and we do the same promotions year after year because it’s fast and it’s worked in the past.
But it can be life-changing to pause and really take note of what’s happening around us. Lou encouraged his players to ask themselves “What’s Important Now?” at least 35 times a day! For those of us who get through life by multi-tasking and juggling two or three priorities at a time—it can be tough to stop and truly consider what one thing deserves top priority and our full attention at any given moment. But when we are able to slow down and truly focus on what’s important now, we often find that our thoughts are clearer and our responses are more informed and creative.
At CSM we are committed to having a W.I.N mentality in 2023. Won’t you join us? The impact on our health, our relationships and our careers may not get us into a New Year’s Day bowl game, but we believe it will allow us to look back on 2023 as a season of victory!
