The New Year is upon us. Yet as I write this post in early January 2022, I must take a short pause to wonder about a couple things. How many of us had a great 2021? How many of us are hoping that 2022 is exponentially better than 2021? How many of us made New Year’s Resolutions?

With the new year come new possibilities and new opportunities. Today, I would like to take a moment to share with you an important strategy for building momentum for whatever goals and objectives you have made up your mind to achieve this year.

If you are anything like me, you are now getting to the point where you have a list of things that you'd like to change. And given that we are coming up on the New Year, you may have quite a list of things that you would put in the category of “New Year’s Resolutions.”

The playground of life can be a harsh teacher. The kids on the playground can be so blunt. As a result, we develop little pieces of supposed wisdom to help us through these turbulent times. Phrases like “sticks and stones may break my bones” or “I’m rubber and you’re glue.”

Perhaps you've heard the expression before that experience is the best teacher? I know I have, and I would even suggest that I subscribe to it.

As leaders we have all sorts of things coming at us all the time. And if we are honest with one another, the things coming at us are often not good.

A few weeks ago, I shared the lesson of the rubber band. The rubber band teaches us that we need some tension in our lives to do and be our best. There is also a lesson we can learn from the chain.

We need to have some mechanism to call a timeout. Some way to break the momentum of an object going in motion the wrong direction. We need some way to interrupt and break the circuit.

Are you taking care of yourself, so that you can take care of others? Maybe you are, but it isn’t enough. If that's the case, find out what others are doing for self-care. You may very well need several items in your bag of tricks to take care of yourself.

A topic that is coming up all the more often is burnout. As leaders, we cannot ignore it. We may even be going through burnout ourselves. As we continue this thread of leading in difficult times, let's take a few minutes to begin to wrap our arms around this subject.