HOW TO STICK TO YOUR NEW YEAR RESOLUTIONS

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Still working on those new year resolutions but feel like you are losing your way along the journey? Making lifestyle changes can be a challenging time and sticking to it can often become difficult because people adopt an “all or nothing” attitude. This type of thinking can often lead to feeling overwhelmed at the task ahead. And once the mind is overworked, it often tries to find it’s way back to the familiar, old routines. Don’t let another year pass by! Get through the Tunnel and Embrace the Power of Change by breaking it down and create a new lifestyle step by step.

Most of us go great guns in the month of January to reach our new year’s goals. But so often this goal is larger than what the lifestyle is ready to accept. For example — saying that you need to work out more doesn’t mean your best course of action is to go to the gym four hours a day, 7 days a week. So new years resolutions should be more about setting mini-resolutions based upon one main idea.

Trying to tackle a resolution with an all or nothing attitude is often why many feel a “lack of motivation” about this time of the year . It’s not so much a lack of wanting to reach the big goal. It’s more a lack of a plan of accomplishment that holds most people back. Take this for example going to the gym. There are so many people in January and February who are pumping it up. But the people that remain for the rest of the year took measured, calculated and well defined steps in order to make a lifestyle change, not just a change of schedule. You can’t decide to run a marathon on Saturday and hit the pavement on Sunday. And this is so for any type of “resolution” you are facing. You have to change your style of your life first before it becomes a lifestyle change.

We all love that good feeling of reaching a goal so why not reward yourself frequently by setting realistic mini-goals! The sense of accomplishment is an amazing boost toward setting and reaching the next step. And in certain cases it can create a new fall back position. A great example of this is taking your workout routines from zero to 3 – 4x a week, a “smaller” goal, rather than zero to 5 – 6x a week, a “bigger” goal. You may be able to accomplish the smaller goal in an easier way so it becomes a part of your life, which means it is a permanent change. So when you begin to work toward the bigger goal, you already have a firm baseline to fall back on while you begin to reach toward the bigger goal.

And, finally, when you take a big major resolution and break it down into smaller mini-resolutions, you begin to understand so much more about how you got there in the first place. Handling the fears of making change step by step is way more comfortable than trying to wrap your mind around something so big that it has to be a resolution in the first place. This is the last critical piece to making permanent change — understanding the whys and thoughts behind it all. “When you choose to change your thoughts, you begin to change your life.”

This is just one of the themes that I talk about in my book, The Zing. The Tunnel is that part of your journey which holds your challenge. The urge to go back out is sometimes so great that you lose sight of the successes that you have achieved along the way. Sometimes all it takes is just knowing that this is how making change should feel and if you stick to it, you will get through even the hardest and darkest parts of the Tunnel and find that one drop of light to grab onto. And that one drop can keep you on the path of keeping your January 1st promises.

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