Jump Off Your Lilypad: Making Your 2025 Goals a Reality

It’s that time of year again.  Time to reflect on where we’re headed in 2025 with our leadership, our teams, and our businesses.  Time to plan, set goals, and create strategies for how we’ll achieve those goals. 

Goal setting is one of the oldest approaches for achieving success.  Humans have always set goals.  Our brain’s superior capacity to plan, set goals, and build strategies to reach those goals is part of what made us the most dominant species in our planet’s food chain.  

Formal research on goal setting dates to the 1930s and remains a hot topic today.  A quick search on Google reveals an almost endless number of goal setting strategies, tactics, hacks, and tricks.  However, it seems all that guidance has not fully taken hold since it’s such a popular topic.  You’d think that we would have mastered it by now.  But the truth is many of us fail to achieve our goals.  Especially those goals related to our own behaviors, like our leadership goals. 

From my decades of experience, both personal and professional, I’ve discovered the secret is not in the goal setting, it’s in the goal doing.  The reality is that too many well-intentioned goals never even get off the ground.  A simple riddle I love to share with my clients provides a humorous look at the issue:

Two frogs are sitting on a Lilypad. 

One decides to jump. 

How many frogs are left?

The answer?

Two.

There’s a world of difference between deciding to jump and actually jumping.  It’s the same difference between goal setting and goal doing.

My clients enlist my services because they’ve decided to make improvements in their leadership effectiveness.  To do that I help them implement strategies from neuropsychology to achieve those improvements.  My most important role in that process is found in the word “implement”.  It’s not enough to just help them build a strategy.  I also provide value in helping them be accountable for doing those strategies.  Virtually all of my clients need help in the doing part.

It’s not because they’re lazy.  It’s not because they lack intelligence.  It’s not because they’re too busy.   It’s not even because they lack motivation. 

It’s because their brain is wired, and their mind is socialized, to maintain the status quo.  Especially when it comes to changing their own behavior.   

So, no matter which of the umpteen hundred goal setting strategies you choose to use, the one seemingly magical and most important part is to act. Take the first step.

There is nothing that can replace taking action to turn goals into results.  Even tiny steps keep the momentum going.  Our brain and mind love momentum.  Small steps in the right direction release “feel good” neurochemicals into our brain, like dopamine, oxytocin and serotonin.  The good feeling created by that neurochemical soup increases the chances you’ll take another step, and another, and another.  You get the idea. 

So, the best hack you can apply to achieve your 2025 goals is to do something every day to keep moving toward your goal, even if it’s a miniscule step.  Those steps repeated, and added to, over time create small wins which grow into big wins, which leads to goal achievement.  That’s the power of goal doing.  So, for 2025, don’t just decide to jump off your Lilypad, jump.