Why do New Year’s Resolution often fail?

Here are a few questions…

You may have fallen prey as most people do and make New Year’s Resolution Every. Single. Year. You start out with good intentions such as eating healthier, exercising more, spending more time with family/friends, and so forth. As each day goes by and into the months those good intentions start to slip away and soon the exercise equipment you intended to use at the beginning of the year is now perhaps being used as a place to hang your clothes.

Your intentions are good, but they aren’t great or best for you. Perhaps you based your good intentions on what you think you should or ought to do or what you think other people want you to do.NAVIGATING POINTS TO CREATING MORE POSITIVE LONG-LASTING CHANGES FOR THE NEW YEAR AND BEYOND:

1) What do you value in your life? What is priceless in your life?
For example, do you value your health, family, independence, fun, wealth, career, etc.?
Write down a list of what you value in your life.

2) Why do you value those items that you listed in your life?
For example, if you wrote down health: Why do you value your health? Is your health important so you can have more time with your family or you can go to work to provide for yourself and/or your family? If you wrote down money: why do you value money? Is it to pay your bills or allow you to travel? If you wrote down time: why do you value time? Is it to spend more time with family/friends or more freedom of time to do as you wish? You get the idea.
Write down your answers to your ‘why’ you value those items you listed. In other words write down your reasons next to the values on your list.

3) Make your goals align with what you want and why you want it.
If you’re not sure where to start with making goals or find it difficult to make or keep goals, then start with daily goals. Once you are comfortable with making daily goals, then step up to weekly goals, then to monthly goals, then yearly, 3-year, 5-year, and 10-year goals.

Here is the key in order to make and keep goals, you first need to understand what goals are.

I define GOALS as the following:

G: Ground (level you are currently at). What do you really want?

• This isn’t about what you think you should want or what other people think you should want.
• For example, if you choose losing weight as a goal, ask yourself is this what I really want or is it something I want because everyone else thinks I should and need to lose weight?

O: Objectives/Opportunities to Obtain. Why do you want to achieve what you want? Be honest. 

• If your goal is to lose weight, then why do you want to lose weight? What is your reason/objective for losing weight or reason/objective for your set target weight loss?
• What is the reason or rationale or objective for obtaining your goal?

A: Appropriate Actions. Take one appropriate action at a time to attract and obtain your objectives/opportunities.

• For example, if you are looking to lose weight then start by taking appropriate actions such as replacing junk food with one fresh fruit or vegetable a day. Skipping meals to lose weight would be considered inappropriate actions as this will cause more harm than good to your body function.
• Put your action on your calendar/schedule as you would with any of your important appointments. Your objectives and opportunities become mere entertainment when appropriate actions are not taken.

L: Leverage (level up). Once you accomplished one action then add another action and keep building as you take one step level at a time.

• For example, with the weight loss, once you’ve accomplished the goal of replacing one fresh fruit or vegetable with junk food at least one time a day every day, then you can add another action such as walking around the block or walking for 15 minutes a day.
• The idea is that once you accomplished one action you add another action and you keep building upon one action on top of the other actions to lead to your success.

S: Success. When you learned, gained and/or achieved your results.

• As you worked on your goal of losing weight you most likely also noticed some other added health benefits such as improve energy as well as learned better and more effective ways to take care of yourself.
• If you happened to have stumbled or failed (as most people often do) on one of your steps, actions, and/or on your goals along the way you still succeed when you learned and grew from the experience.