NY Resolutions: Are You Doing Them Wrong?

THIS is the time of year where many of us, after scoffing down a months worth of food in two days, start to get serious about what we have planned for ourselves for 2015.

The New Year is a time for us to reflect on personal changes we want or ought to be making.

We wave goodbye to the mistakes, mucks-ups and hiccups of the past year and resolve not to make them again. We get excited about the year ahead as well as the new and improved us that is going to go along with it.

I can almost guarantee that there is something that is buzzing around in your brain at the moment that you are planning on changing once you recover from your hangover on Thursday.

The most common New Year’s resolutions tend to be ways of making ourselves ‘better’. Things like getting healthier, losing weight, quitting smoking, drinking less, eating better food, spending more time with family and stressing less.

But for many of us, the eagerness to make resolutions is not met with success. They usually fizzle away after a few days, or if we are lucky a couple of months.

Most people don’t keep them and this is often to do with making their resolutions unattainable and possibly too overarching.

So from my perspective, if you want a more sustainable New Year’s resolution (one that you can keep) then you need to set them properly from the beginning.

It’s all in the right goal-setting.

Your resolutions need to be determined, fixed, purposeful and have intent. After all, this is what ‘resolute’ means. Otherwise your new year goals might as well be called your New Year’s ‘half-assolutions’.

Firstly, there might be a few things you want to change. Just pick one of them to start with, the main one that YOU want and intend to do (not one that someone else wants you to do).

Work on this one first and tackle it by itself. Now look at this goal and break it down into particular small steps that you could take to tackle the goal.

For example — if you want to lose weight, you could add nutritious food to your diet, you could exercise more or perhaps you could cut out your favourite daily snack.

Of these little steps, pick one that lights you up the most, the one that you know you are more likely to do. Then start with that.

So perhaps just adding some more greens to your daily diet will kick start you for a few weeks. This way it will be easier and you are more likely to do it.

This will increase that self-esteem of yours and give you the confidence to move on to the more trickier behaviours that are needed for your resolutions.

Want some more advice for keeping your New Year’s resolutions? Don’t give up. Success in anything requires persistence. So if you find yourself mucking up one day, then you can start again the next day.

You don’t actually have to wait a whole year to restart them. No one is looking!