January is a time of setting goals, hopes, and aspirations for the year ahead. The dreaming part is exciting and fun. The doing part is where the fun can start to plummet.
One of the best ways to improve your chances of meeting your goals is to increase your self-awareness and design approaches to meet your individual tendencies.
How Do You Meet Expectations?
Expectations can come from something you want to achieve or expectations that others in your life (like a spouse, manager, or friend) set for you. Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies is a great tool to understand how you meet expectations and design strategies to achieve your goals that are right for your tendency.
The four groups are as follows:
UPHOLDER – Meets both outer and inner expectations.
OBLIGER – Meets outer expectations and resists inner expectations.
QUESTIONER – Meets inner expectations and resists outer expectations.
REBEL – Resists both outer and inner expectations.
I am an Upholder and I’ve used this information to help me develop an approach to my goals that works for this tendency. Two of the key strategies that work for me are scheduling and monitoring.
While these work for me, I know they likely won’t work for the other tendency types.
Your Turn
Do you know your tendency? If not, you can take Gretchen’s free quiz here.
Do you use the insight of your tendency to meet your goals? If you haven’t tried that yet, this blog post lays out strategies for each of the tendencies to implement to help meet expectations.
Additional resources for those who want to dig deeper include The Four Tendencies book and course.