New Year’s Resolutions: Why Bother?
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Lots of articles have crossed my desk over the last few weeks about the pros and cons of making New Year’s Resolutions. On radio and T.V. resolutions are treated more as amusing human interest stories, or as out right jokes. New Year’s resolutions pop up in Comedy routines with barbs aimed at celebrities and politicians. Even leading self-development gurus offer mixed assessments of the whole resolution process.
The big negative, of course, is resolutions set you up for failure. Resolutions tend to die quick and ugly deaths, quite often before the person making the resolutions has time to even think about the task ahead.
I come down firmly on the side of those who believe the exercise provides a general framework to hang the rest of the year on. I believe it is important each year to reflect on what has happened over the past year and project forward where you would like to find yourself at the end of the next. While the start of the New Year is largely artificial, it serves as a convenient milestone.
I do have some guidelines to help make resolutions stick. Since I believe in the middle road, or the middle way, I suggest a set of resolutions that work as a framework with general goals rather than very specific ones. A resolution has to avoid being so general as to have no meaning, as well as being too specific that you set yourself up for failure immediately.
Let’s take weight loss. Loosing weight is a wonderful goal, especially in light of the growing obesity epidemic that is leading to high levels of diabetes and heart disease. This year, weight loss ranked between number one and number three on most top ten lists.
Here are some possible resolutions:
To loose weight in 2008 (so general that one ounce would fulfill the resolution).
To eat less in 2008, (same problem).
To exercise 30 minutes everyday, (January 02 comes around you attend a party get home late, no time to exercise, boom, resolutions is a bust).
Here’s my middle ground solution. First off use the suffix “by the end of (the Year).†Now we have built in a little leeway. Your resolution can’t fail in the first two or three weeks. Now our resolution can pick-up some specificity with out being in immediate danger of failure. Let’s take another crack at the resolution.
To loose 60 pounds by the end of the end of 2008: (better but let’s look closely at that resolution).
Sixty pounds is a huge challenge for even the most dedicated person. Yes if you are on that weight loss reality show and stand to win 100,000 plus, the motivation might be there. To loose sixty pounds means you will need to loose 5 pounds a month, well within the realm of possibility but requiring an enormous amount of will power to achieve. If you have not been successful before, then I would suggest you moderate your resolution to 30 pounds.
Restated, here is your new resolution: to loose 30 pounds by the end of 2008. You still have a specific goal and a timeline; it’s achievable but still requires work and commitment.
Now you can break down exactly how you will achieve that goal in small bit size pieces. As an example, you might take the first month to research what steps you will take to make reaching your goal possible. Exercise, diet, and lifestyle change, all play a rolled in your ultimate success. Now you can set up a series of milestones along the way to gauge your success.
Other Tips
It’s never too late to make a resolution, just follow the guidelines I’ve set out.
Don’t make too many resolutions. Stick to two or three. If you make too many resolutions you will be hard pressed to manage them all, setting yourself up for failure.
Publish, post, and announce your resolutions for all to see. At the very least write them down for your own review from time to time. If you don’t write them down you are not committed to them, and by June you will forget what they were to begin with.
Finally, recognize that failing to meet a resolution isn’t the end of the world. You get to the end of the year and instead of loosing 30 pounds you only lost fifteen. Don’t take that as a defeat, celebrate the result, and reset your resolution for the next year. Three years ago I made a resolution, in violation of all my suggested guidelines, to write a thousand words a day. The resolution went by the boards within the first week, yet I persisted with my Kamagra jelly resolution, and wrote over 100,000 words that year, that’s equivalent to a small book!
My Resolutions:
Following my own advice, here are my resolutions for 2008:
1. To publish my first book, by the end of 2008
2. To acquire 500 more subscribers to my newsletter by the end of 2008
3. To publish 52 new and original articles of approximately 1000 words in length by the end of 2008(This article being number one)
There you have it, for all to see.
Now the pundits can laugh and poke fun at my resolutions all they want. I can’t suffer defeat until midnight December 31, 2008. Event then I won’t see my efforts as failure, but rather see success in the degree to which I achieved all or part of those resolutions.
I will report back to you from time to time during the year.
How about you?
PS: This article is 950 words long, right where I wanted it to be. Interesting!
By Nick Grimshawe
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