If your fundraising year runs on the calendar year, yesterday you started over.
If you are everyone else, yesterday still offers you the opportunity to start over personally.
All around us we are told that a new year brings with it big, new possibilities, fresh growth potential, new learnings, and even, reinvention. We might even feel like we should establish bold goals or even, full-blown resolutions, for this new year.
And, if setting big, hairy, audacious goals for yourself and your results has worked for you, then please, continue down that path.
For the rest of us mere mortals, though, our successes – either in fundraising or life – haven’t happened because we’ve experienced bright, brilliant flashes of progress. Most folks don’t ‘leap and bound’ their way toward lasting success. Success rarely happens quickly, much less overnight.
Instead, our success typically happens in small, incremental progressive steps. It happens when we aren’t noticing because we are busy forming habits. Success happens by consistently applying what we’ve learned previously to help manage the next day, the next strategy, the next task.
Success is slow to emerge and it needs consistency like our lungs need oxygen.
We put a lot of pressure on the new year – whether it is the new fundraising year or the new calendar year. We use phrases like, “out with the old, in with the new.” Or, “a new ‘you,’ in the new year.” Those sayings sounds like a lot of change!
Perhaps we are better off viewing each day as the opportunity to use what we learned yesterday to be just a little bit better. Maybe its in the little, inconspicuous green shoots of new growth and progress that we experience true transformation.
Starting over is a great concept for personal and professional development.
But, maybe we need to embrace the power of doing just a little less of it far more consistently than once per year.
