January 9, 2017
Time To Gear Ourselves Up Again.
Well firstly Happy New Year to everyone….
I wonder how your Christmas and New Year faired and have you made any New Year resolutions this year? Possibly they are the same or similar to the ones you made last year, or if you’re anything like me, then you didn’t make any!!
I gave up making resolutions years ago when I realised that although I started with good intentions (sound familiar), I generally only stuck to them for a few weeks, or a month or so. These New Years resolutions would then become tied up in my mind as a burden of guilt, because I wasn’t necessarily following them and I would subsequently feel guilty for another month, before I decided they really were not worth carrying on with, subsequently giving them up.
As I got older, I decided it would be more positive and productive if I worked with living any potential “resolutions” as part of how I chose to live my life on a daily basis, rather than on an annual post Christmas and 1st of January basis.
So the question I’d like you to ask yourself is; how do you think you could achieve and incorporate your “New Years resolutions” into your daily life – all year round – and take the pressure of post Christmas guilt off yourself?
Irritatingly our minds are predisposed towards negative thoughts (guilt, anxiety etc) and this builds pressure, but it doesn’t mean we actually have to live that way and give in to what our minds tell us.
Pressure actually = positivity. It’s more about finding the right balance and amount of pressure that suits you… although that can be the hard work to maintain. The fact is, we all need a little bit of pressure to give us motivation to get on with our daily lives. If we didn’t have any pressure we would all just stay lolling around in bed – nice thought sometimes I know, especially in January!
So, going back to those New Years resolutions and how you could choose to incorporate them into your every day life, enabling them to become unconscious daily resolutions.
Firstly they need to be RAM…
- Realistic.
- Achievable
- Maintainable.
If they aren’t then you’re already setting yourself up to fail before you’ve even started.
Be kind to yourself in this new approach to resolution setting. That’s where the “realistic” side of things comes in. Staying in your grown-up head and not playing an emotional game with yourself is how you are able to set your resolutions to become positive unconscious ways of living all year round.
Being realistic really does mean just that. Realistic goals towards the resolutions you want to achieve need to be maintainable and sustainable long term.
Let me, help you, help yourself… towards your long-term, sustainable, all year round resolutions…