By Peter Kamuri

Kenya: There is likelihood you spent the last two days of the New Year making countless career resolutions. This year, you want to increase your visibility at the workplace.

This includes a pay hike or a promotion; building of networks or shedding off a few kilogrammes.

Besides the New Year resolutions, there are pitfalls from previous years you would want to avoid for successful work place life. Perhaps, you were incessantly late for work; always had trouble with either the boss, never met neither deadlines nor targets.

Job performance

Making New Year career resolutions helps one to discard bad old habits and adopt new ones. This helps improve your relationship with other people. It can also boost your job performance.

However, though many people make innumerable resolutions at the beginning of each new year, many break them long before accomplishing the first step.

In some cases, this happens within a few days or weeks into the new year. One major reason why New Year career resolutions fail is that most of them are unrealistic and unattainable. Some people resolve to achieve what is unachievable within a given time frame or with the available resources, leading to failure and subsequent frustrations. Career experts advise people to keep resolutions, they should have plans that can be put into action. Establishing a goal without developing a plan is an exercise in futility.

Have a good plan that defines the steps to be followed and what it takes to achieve your objective. It is also important to establish what you are capable of doing without expecting too much from yourself. Some resolutions are not easy to stick to, so find out what it takes before committing yourself.

As you make your career resolutions for this year, always remember that you may not realise you goal in a day or a week.

This is despite the fact that it takes a day or even hours to come up with a resolution. It is usually a process that starts with one step, leading you to the accomplishment of the ultimate goal.

You must also be flexible to allow for unexpected changes. There are many twists and turns in life that may hold you back form realization of your goal and you should envisage such challenges.

Be resilient to succeed. To make your New Year resolutions work, you must be prepared to make some sacrifices. It takes commitment to succeed. We wish you a happy 2014!

—kamuripck@gmail.com