12 Ways To Stick To Your New Year’s Resolution

We’re here again – New Year’s Resolution time!  It’s that time of year when we wave goodbye to the end of one year and welcome in another, hopefully better, New Year.  Over-indulgence, unachieved goals, flagging exercise routines, slave-labour hours spent working suddenly take on a shiny and bright challenge as we use the New Year as a catalyst to finally make the changes we have been promising ourselves.

So how do we stick to our New Year’s Resolution?

Keep it simple

One of the main reasons many of us don’t stick to our New Year’s Resolution is because we make too many of them and make them too hard.  Furthermore, we end up intimidating ourselves. So choose one New Year’s Resolution and then build from that.  If you want to lose weight, focus on one particular aspect of losing weight first of all.  Once you are making headway and are on the road to success, you can then add other things that will complement the weight loss.

Work out a plan

For instance, to lose weight do you need to exercise more often?  Do you need to change what you eat?  Do you need to reduce your portion size?  Is sugar the problem?  Be specific about what aspect of weight loss you are going to target first.  When we try to stick to a New Year’s Resolution, we tend to create an image in our head that is vague.  And most likely has lots of other images crowding around it and invading the image of your main goal.  So be razor-sharp in your focus of the one aspect of your New Year’s Resolution you want to achieve.  By having a plan, you can then introduce other aspects to your plan week by week or month by month.

Intrinsic motivation

You will find that many people write about rewarding yourself when you reach certain goals.  And to a degree this works, but to help you maintain motivation and stick to your New Year’s Resolution, you need intrinsic motivation to get you to where you want to be.  Intrinsic motivation is how success of achieving your New Year’s Resolution is experienced by you and this is an important aspect of achieving success.

Decide what your end goal is.  What does it look like?  What do you look like when you’ve achieved it?  How are you feeling inside when you see yourself achieving your goal?  Tune into these images and sensations as deeply as you can.  What’s more, these images and sensations build the intrinsic motivation which will keep you on track to sticking to your New Year’s Resolution.

Chunk it down

Once you have identified your ultimate goal, next, work backwards.  Once you’re really “feeling” the end goal, work out the steps you need to take to get there.  Write them down.  Consequently, when you write down the steps to achieving your goal, it makes it more real in your head.  Once you get your brain onside it helps your thoughts become actions.  Make the steps small and easy to achieve.  Chunk them down to the minimum amount you need to do each day to reach your end goal.  As a result you’ll be amazed at how seemingly tiny, repetitive actions can lead ultimately to huge and lasting success.

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Timing is key

Make sure that you “do” your new habit at a time of day that fits in well with that habit.  If it’s a commitment to start getting fit, it might be that you start to skip for 5 minutes to get your heart warmed up then do 2 pushups for strength training for the first week every day before you get showered.  Consequently as you progress and become fitter and stronger you can add more cardio to your routine and increase the strength training exercises.

If it’s creating a new writing habit, make sure you find a time of day that works well for you to spend your allotted time writing without distraction.  Just commit to writing a certain amount of words a day.  Several of the highly successful people I follow have used this strategy and with time and determination are now the proud owners of several published books.

My New Year’s Resolution

Creating a writing habit is my New Year’s Resolution this year.  I’ve been meaning to start on my book series all last year, and have been pushed for time with other commitments.  2017 is going to see me start writing my “I Wish I Could” series of books.  So I’m going to follow my own advice and write a minimum amount of 500 words every day, probably between 11.00 and 12.00 as that is when I tend to have a gap between clients and it’s after I’ve taken the children to school and have finished my exercises.  I work better in the morning, so it makes sense to bash out my habit while my brain is still functioning well, or better at least!

Baby steps

The key is to maintain the momentum of your baby steps and gradually you will get closer to achieving your New Year’s Resolution.  What’s more is that the more you ingrain your new habit into your daily routine, the easier it will become.  Have faith and enjoy the process.  Habit creation has a much greater chance of success when the habit is easy to do and doesn’t involve an entire lifestyle change all in one go.  Consequently, baby steps are the key to long-lasting success.

Visualisations

Just before you start the habit to achieve your New Year’s Resolution spend a few moments, every day, visualising how life will be.  What you will look like?  What will your success feel like when you’ve achieved it?  Top sports people and business leaders use visualisation as a strategy to help perfect their talent.  When we visualise what we want to achieve we create neural pathways in the brain.  As a result, the more we visualise the end goal, the stronger the neural pathways become and soon your habit will become second-nature to you.

Alpha waves

What’s more, when we visualise something that creates pleasure, we become more relaxed which encourages our brain waves to move from beta waves (waking brain) to alpha waves (relaxed brain).  When our brains are in alpha mode, we experience greater feelings of relaxation as we produce more serotonin.  Furthermore we retain information more easily.  Who doesn’t want to feel more relaxed and remember better?

Accept failure

Occasionally life will get in the way and you’ll be challenged to maintain your habit and stick to your New Year’s Resolution.  When this happens try not to beat yourself up about it.  Creating stress around the habit will undermine your good intentions and eat away at your motivation.  If you have a bad day, let it go.  You’re human and you’re allowed to mess up sometimes.

If you find that you’re not achieving your habit regularly, ask yourself why it’s not working.  Is it a lack of time?  If so, make a list of priorities.  You can’t humanly achieve absolutely everything in a day.  Sometimes you’ll be faced with deciding which priority is the most important to you achieving success.  It might be that you need to get out of bed 30 – 60 minutes earlier.  Providing you are getting good rest when you’re in bed, getting up slightly earlier every day can have very positive results on your sense of self-esteem as well as helping you achieve your goal.

Keep decisions easy

Once you’ve prioritised what you absolutely need to do to stick to your New Year’s Resolution, just do it.  Don’t question yourself about whether you’re going to do it or not.  Just do it.  Take the decision-making process away from it.  Not only does this remove emotion and possible resistance from creating the habit, it also frees up mental energy for decisions that do warrant your attention.

Review progress

Every month review your progress.  Does anything need tweaking for you to achieve your New Year’s Resolution more easily?  Are you ready to add an element to your challenge?  If you’re getting fit, could you add extra cardio to your routine?  If you’re losing weight, can you cut out the sweet treats 80% of the time?

Accumulative success

You’ll find that once you start doing your New Year’s Resolution regularly and it has become part of your daily routine, it will have beneficial effects on other parts of your life.  Additionally, you will have more confidence and your self-esteem will be boosted.  Furthermore, you may be keen to take on more challenges as your faith in your ability to achieve success continues to grow.

Personally, regular exercise is key to my ability to maintain good health and balance in my life.  When I regularly exercise it makes me feel great.  I eat more healthily because I want to maintain the good work of my exercise routine.  As a result, exercise maintains my ideal weight.  I feel more energetic which encourages me to take on more challenges.  My skin is clear because exercise helps me detox.  I sleep better and so am more relaxed.  In addition, I stretch after each exercise session and so my muscles are kept in optimal health.  Exercise helps me deal with stressy days more functionally and clears the cobwebs away when I’m feeling lethargic. Certainly, for me anyway, exercise is the catalyst for many of the other positive things I do in my life.  What’s your catalyst for positive change?

Summary of the 12 ways to help you stick to your New Year’s Resolution:

Whatever your New Year’s Resolution is, follow these steps to achieve success:

• Keep it simple.
• Work out a razor-sharp plan.
• What drives your intrinsic motivation?
• Chunk it down to the minimum.
• Work out the best time to create your habit.
• Baby steps are the key to long-lasting success.
• Do daily visualisations to hone your focus.
• Do some alpha wave surfing.
• Accept occasional failures.
• Avoid asking yourself if you want to do your habit, just do it.
• Regularly review your progress.
• Enjoy cumulative success while achieving your New Year’s Resolutions.

Good luck and please let me know what your New Year’s Resolution is this year.  I’ll report back at the end of 2017 to let you know how successful I’ve been with creating my new writing habit.

Happy New Year and wishing you good health and happiness for 2017.