First off, hats off to you for making yet another list of New Year’s Resolutions! (Because let’s be honest, the idea of making promises to yourself to keep for a whole year is very daunting.) New Year’s Resolutions start off as noble ideas full of hope for the upcoming year. However, the process of sticking through with them seems like a constant battle with yourself. So, what’s the secret to keeping your resolutions for the whole year? Here’s a simple, fool-proof method.
What separates those who achieve their goals is that those who achieve results make a fresh choice every single day on what they have decided. What does this mean? This means that every day they revisit in their minds what they have promised to themselves. Let’s say one of your New Year’s Resolutions was to hit the gym everyday. Then, every morning when you wake up make the choice in your mind that you will go to the gym at a certain time.
If you feel that choice slowly losing power as the day goes by, then make the choice again in the afternoon and again a few hours later. Keep making the choice until you actually do what you said you would do. It’s about consciously having that inner conversation with your own brain and telling yourself that you will make your goal of going to the gym in real life.
People who make the choice just once on January 1st to do A, B, C for the whole year are setting themselves up for inevitable failure. Why? Because they only consciously made the choice in their brain at time that they *hope* sticks for the whole year. But, as we all know painfully too well....?
Focus on the day. Trying to hold yourself up to fulfilling a promise for all 365 is bound to feel burdensome and daunting. By natural instinct, when human beings feel burdened or scared then we run. We run, and running means making any and all excuses on who/what/why we aren’t able to stick to our resolution today. However, if you just focus on one day--today--then 24 hours seems much less daunting than 365 days. Make the choice today to fulfill your resolution.
If you succeed today, then repeat this choice tomorrow and the day after. This makes 3 days of success! Two more repetitions of making 3 choices makes a total of 9 days. Nine days will become 18 and 18 will become 36, and before you know it, 36 days will become 365. It’s all about making a single choice for a single day. Take one day at a time. No more, no less. You owe yourself one day of success.
We are all bound to make mistakes because we are only human. Good news is that the goal isn’t to be perfect. No one will perfectly uphold their resolutions and promises exactly the way they intend...and that is OK! Focus on the progress and not the perfection. Cheer yourself on on your successes and still cheer yourself on despite your slip-ups. You are a work in progress. After all is said and done, if you are a better person today than you were yesterday, then you are in much better shape and heading in the right direction for success in 2016.