A Practical Approach for Keeping New Year's Resolutions

We all want to change something in order to make our world better so that we can enjoy it more. At this time of year those changes often take the form of New Year's Resolutions, and right about now some of you are about to give up on a resolution or two. Don't! The secret is to do 3 simple things to make your Resolutions really work for you instead of against you.

Before going into the three simple things, take a moment to consider the form of typical New Year's Resolutions. They are things like "I'm going to lose weight." or "I'm going to start feeling better." Those are very broad topics. The problem is that these are like someone asking you to shoot at a target that's "over there somewhere." You can only hit a target if someone says, "Hit that target right there." In the same sense you need a clear target. "I'm going to lose 30 pounds." and "I will make my knees stop hurting." are much less lofty Resolutions because you can definitely say whether or not you acomplish them. Even so, there is a problem with them. This goes into what can be called The Psychology of Daily Defeats. If you set your Resolution to lose 30 pounds, the fact is that you can't acomplish that in a short amount of time. It just can't be done. So, everytime you get on the scale you will say to yourself, "I haven't lost the 30 pounds yet." or "I still need to lose 25 pounds." That means you experience defeat because you haven't achieved your Resolution… evenutally you give up.

So the second step is to create micro Resolutions. Things you can easily accomplish on a day to day or weekly basis. For example, the lose 30 pounds Resolution can be broken up into micro Resolutions like…

1. Find out about glycemic index based eating this week
2. Do 1 Vitalogy Recipe this week
3. Eat Vitalogy meals 80% of the time this week
4. Lose 1 pound this week

These are simply, easily accomplished micro Resolutions you achieve one small thing each week. Then you begin to experience Daily Successes. That reinforces what you are doing.

Many people will recognize this as setting goals and tasks from objectives. Those words work great in business, but the problem is that they are too weak psychologically for personal change. So, the third simple thing to do is to make a commitment in writing to someone you care about for each micro Resolution… and report back to them on how you did. If you make the commitment to lose 1 pound, then report that back.

These three simple steps of

1. defining clear targets
2. setting easily acomplished micro Resolutions
3. making commitments about your micro Resolutions

Will help you achieve the Resolutions that you made.