How Grit Will Carry You Once the New Year's High is Gone

Flip open your email, your Instagram, your Facebook, any social media channel, really.

What do you see?

If your feeds look anything like mine this week, you see a metric ton of rah rah resolutions posts, shared listicles pontificating about 5 easy ways to do this or that better in 2016, gym check-ins, green juice pictures ( * shudder *), proclamations of one's "WORD" for 2016, and announcements about the Whole30 diet (I actually had to look that one up after I saw 87 people talking about it in my Facebook feed.)

You may also be seeing a wave of LinkedIn connection requests coming in, because it's New Year's and we're all fired up about MAKING 2016 OUR YEAR.

Now, don't get me wrong. The hope and excitement splayed across every page is, at face, energizing and refreshing. I truly love how each new year brings a fresh start, fresh inspiration and fresh ideas to so many. (And, from a job change standpoint, January is actually a great time to get started because many companies ramp up hiring at the beginning of the year.)

But I've also grown a bit weary from the beehive of resolution activity that goes down on social media every January, because I've witnessed time and again how rapidly this fervor expires and how readily the very people who so jubilantly announced their intentions to the world bail out -- sometimes in a matter of days -- on the goals they were so optimistically planning to achieve.

So how do you avoid being one of the all-talk and no-walk resolutioners in 2016?

How do make the dream a reality, tackle the goal or climb the proverbial mountain of success once the New Year's high is gone, and the day-to-day has settled back in?

Grit

I've talked about grit before, and now I'm going to talk about it again, because grit -- not Facebook -- is what is going to carry us all through January, through 2016 and through the months and years that follow.

GRIT \ grit \ noun - Mental toughness; firmness of mind or spirit: unyielding courage in the face of hardship

Folks, the New Year's buzz will wear off here, and it will happen relatively swiftly as we all head back to our normal, post-holiday routines. You're going to run into a day, a week or a specific event that will suck so many eggs that you're inclined to simply throw your hands up and say, "You win, life. I give."

You're going to get bored. Progress will feel slow. Shit will happen. The weather will annoy you. People will doubt you.

You will doubt you.

These things are a given.

So, if you're truly committed to being among the ones who win in 2016, you're going to need a hearty dose of resilience, determination and discipline to push yourself through the discomfort, the doldrums, the setbacks and the uncertainty that are sure to show up in a matter of days, more than likely when you are least prepared to deal with them.

You'll need optimism, even when it seems unmusterable. Passion. And no small amount of sheer stubbornness.

And you'll need to know when to turn off (or stop contributing to) the empty chatter that's splayed everywhere on social media, in your inbox and all around you in real life right now.

Step away from the blabber. Put your head down, and start chipping away at making meaningful things happen for YOU -- be that in your career, or your personal life.

Dig in. Muster the grit. And if you need help along the way?

We're right here for you.

Here's to making 2016 your year. You've got this thing on lock.