How To Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions
The new year has arrived, a time when many people make New Year’s resolutions to improve their lives. Unfortunately, while many people start out with lots of motivation for keeping their resolution, a large percentage of them end up failing. Two common causes for failing is not making an action plan, and focusing on the wrong things.
Plan Your Work and Work Your Plan
Just making a resolution is not enough. You also need to come up with an action plan that will help you to stay committed to keeping your resolution(s). For example, if your New year’s resolution is to lose weight, then you need to figure out what actions you are going to take on a regular basis to achieve that goal. How much exercise you are going to do and how often you will do it, what changes you are going to make to your diet, and what nutritional supplements you will be taking. Plan what you are going to do, and then do it.
Focus on Your Actions
A mistake many people make when trying to keep a New Year’s resolution is focusing on the end goal, instead of what they need to do to achieve it. Going back to the example of trying to lose weight, if you focus on your target weight number and do not see progress fast enough, you run the risk of becoming discouraged and giving up. Instead, focus on being consistent with the actions you need to take on a daily basis that will help you keep your resolution. Progress is rarely linear – it can seem like nothing is happening for a long time, and then all at once everything comes together and you see big progress. The more consistent you are with your actions, the better the end result will turn out.
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Tags: achieving goals, diet, exercise, New Year's resolutions, progress, setting goals, taking action
Goals, Self Improvement, Success | Roy January 7, 2012