The arrival of a new year always brings excitement. It marks the opportunity for a fresh start and although our resolutions clearly reveal our hopes of starting anew, many of us will not achieve our stated goals.
Resolution failures happen for several reasons: 1~Our stated goals are either not what we really want, or they are too unrealistic 2~We fail to have a strategy for success in place 3~We lack a system for accountability and support 4~We share our goal with someone who criticizes it or sabotages us
When we begin to back peddle from our declaration, or fail at achieving it early on, we have usually lost the reason for why we wanted it to begin with, and if we are not accountable to someone who is supportive, we are off the hook about why we have lost momentum or given up, so achieving the goal is an illusion.
For most people, even the more successful ones, it takes three to six months to form a new habit, and every person will need constant reminders of why they set out to achieve that certain something in the first place, especially when the going gets tough, and it will. We all need to be accountable to someone during times of transition and we all need strategies for succeeding when the hurdles or tiredness come up, laced in impatience. We must have people around us who are non-judgmental and sincerely supportive, so if your partner or friend is negative or ridicules your desires, efforts, or failures, you are more likely to fail.
Achieving a quick success in the first few weeks of January, when we are most motivated, typically isn’t a result from having created a new habit, and so, the success will be short-lived and unsustainable. A quick little successes in the beginning does trick us, however, into thinking it’s easy to form new habits, and so we silently lessen our efforts or soften our goals to feel that we aren’t letting ourselves down or we want to avoid facing the person we told our resolution to. We become secretly satisfied with less-than what we originally wanted to avoid facing the fact that we aren’t following through or don’t know how to, and we justify wanting less to others by changing our story and logic. Once efforts to achieve a goal are in play, we see that reaching the goal is harder than we thought and that makes us uncomfortable; it is more work than it was supposed to be and we question if it is what we really wanted after all.
It is far easier to fall back into old comfortable habits than it is to push through the transitions. When the vision of the big picture gets lost, responding positively to the pressure you put on yourself to achieve a goal takes practice and time; you have to expect that you will do things wrongly, more slowly, and that you will have some setbacks. This year, follow these simple rules to keep you on track:
1~Set a realistic goal 2~Break the goal down into monthly steps 3~Be accountable to a non-judgmental supporter; report and assess your progress 4~Recognize and acknowledge setbacks; shift your approach monthly, to counter them
Remember change takes patience and strategy and the slow and steady approach always wins the race. Use each month as a new start, working on a small part of the overall goal consistently, rather than saying to yourself “this year I will...” as that will help you succeed.
Good luck, and Happy New Year!
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