If you crave change and set resolutions at the beginning of the year only to walk away from them a few days later, you probably need to try a new method. Imagine how the course of your life could change for the better if you followed through on your ideas and commitments until you reached your goals!
You can overcome your habit of giving up on New Year’s resolutions. Avoid viewing your resolutions as something to aspire to and then forgetting them when they are no longer pertinent. New Year’s resolutions can be extremely enriching once you find a way to maintain them throughout the year.
We’ll also take a look at some other things that may be sabotaging you in creating change and attaining your plans and goals. For now, let’s look at some ideas for helping you keep your resolutions.
Here are some tips for keeping your resolutions:
1. Make the commitment, and mean it. You must be willing to make a strong commitment to change in order for your resolutions to be successful. Believe that you can, and will, accomplish what you set out to do. If you give yourself unwavering support, then you’ll bolster that belief and achieve what you seek.
Commit to New Year’s resolutions that you truly wish to achieve. Make positive resolutions and focus on the positive aspects of achieving them. Tell everyone you know about your resolutions. When everyone knows what you’re setting out to achieve, they can help hold you accountable.
Plan ahead rather than choosing your resolutions at the last minute. The longer you spend planning and preparing for your resolution goals, the better the results will be.
2. Make sure your expectations are grounded and realistic. Continued motivation is the key to achieving your goals. If you set the bar too high, then you also set yourself up for failure, which can strike away your motivation.
Be realistic. Give yourself a challenge, but not so much of a challenge that you set yourself up for failure. If you set similar resolutions as last year, contemplate why last year’s resolutions didn’t work out. If your resolutions didn’t work last time, uncover why. Please see my post on how to succeed with New Year’s Resolutions.
3. Brainstorm, doodle, write down your goals. When you put your resolutions into writing or sketches, you make them real. Get your commitment down on paper. Create your goals where you can see them, in written or drawn form, so you won’t forget what change you are working on.
4. Make plans for your goals. Articulating what you intend to change this year is important, but planning how to create the change is a completely different story. Write your ideas for each resolution that you want to achieve rather than simply hoping for change.
5. Keep your goals flexible. Not everything is going to work out exactly the way you planned, so be flexible in the goals that you set. Don’t let rigid resolutions throw you off if something doesn’t go according to plan. Predict what challenges you may face, and create a contingency plan for those challenges.
You can keep your New Year’s resolutions if you do a little bit of planning and preparing ahead of time. Just like any goal setting process, the key is to be realistic about your goals and the challenges you may face in trying to achieve them. The more realistic and flexible you are, the more likely you’ll be to achieve your goals.
But what if you feel you are having a hard time moving forward?
You May Be Living in the Past
If you notice you still suffer a lot of emotional pain over an upsetting event you experienced long ago, you might be stuck in your history and unable to move forward.
Although some would argue, “What’s so bad about living in the past,” the fact is that doing so means the present—your reality—is flying by without you grabbing on to it to move forward and achieve your life aspirations.
You’re living in the past if:
- You try to sleep as much as possible so you can dream about earlier years. When you sleep at night, your dreams become fantasies about how your life was before. You look forward to those dreams.
- You’re in denial about your current living situation. It’s hard to accept that you no longer have a partner or live in the home you thought you would for the rest of your life. Maybe you don’t want to rearrange the furniture or get rid of some things you don’t use because they remind you of a person who’s no longer in your life.
- You think every day about some aspect of how your life used to be. Maybe you call it “nostalgia” or simple yearnings for what your life was like before. Reflecting daily on the past can get in the way of moving forward.
- You use other methods to “escape” from reality, like reading, cleaning, or even drinking alcohol. Perhaps you’re constantly in motion and doing something so you don’t have to face life as it is now.
- You spend a lot of time on the computer. Being on the computer keeps you busy and you don’t have to think about how your life has changed. You might like to check out my post on how to turn your dreams and goals into reality.
Create Change By Living in the Present Moment
Now that you’ve identified the issue(s), it’s time to re-connect with yourself and move forward to create a fulfilling life. Here’s how to do it:
- Waste no more time. Be in awe of each day. You can do something positive with every 24 hour period. Start immediately.
- Vow to practice special efforts with your feelings. Work to gain understanding of your feelings. Allow yourself to grieve who or what you’ve lost if you need to.
- Openly acknowledge to yourself what you’ve been doing. The first step toward healing is acknowledging the error of your ways. “I’ve been living in the past and I want to stop doing that.”
- Decide what you must do to shift into the present. Do you need to clean out closets, get rid of old possessions, and maybe even move your residence? Sometimes, moving forward in your life literally means moving.
- Know your life goals. Make a plan you can follow to actively pursue your goals.
- Contact professionals if needed. Seek out medical care if you’ve overlooked doing that these past years. Have an annual check-up. If you require psychological assistance to get things in perspective, contact your local mental health center or ask your general physician for a referral to a counselor.
- Take care of yourself. Face yourself in the mirror. Take excellent physical care of yourself. Re-focus your efforts on the current state of your physical body and take care of yourself.
Living in the past robs you of the life you truly deserve. Re-state your life goals to yourself and then begin living out your dreams in the here and now.
8 Strategies to Open Your Mind to Change
You might have felt out of sorts or stressed out for days, weeks, or even months. But what if you were to undergo a paradigm shift and begin to view change as opportunity? What if you could reach out and embrace change with open arms?
Learn to Recognize Opportunity When You See It:
- See that change implies progress. Whether you’re ready to admit it or not, when something changes, it’s progressing toward something. As you probably realize, living life on a day-to-day basis often involves making progress on some level.
- Accept the idea of change. When you get comfortable with the idea that change is going to happen, it will help you go into a change with less stress. John F. Kennedy once said, “The one unchangeable certainty is that nothing is certain or unchangeable.” Change will, in essence, always be occurring. Recognizing this fact will make life easier for you.
- Be ready to experience the “newness” that change brings. If you can shift your thinking from a focus on the unknown to recognize that change involves “newness”—new things, people, places, and ideas—with at least some of it bringing excitement and interest, you’ll feel a whole lot better about it.
- Believe that change can be transformative. You could be exposed to better products, knowledge, and skills as results of change. Many changes also have great aspects that open up your life in ways you hadn’t imagined before. Your experience at work or home—wherever the change occurs—can transform your life for the better.
- Tell yourself that you can adjust to change. The fact is that you’ve probably experienced hundreds of changes so far over your lifetime. And you’ve adjusted to them. You’ve worked things out. You’ll be able to adjust to more changes in the future.
- Recognize that change introduces unknowns into your life. The aspect of change that probably shakes you up the most is that it introduces unknown factors. It can be a bit discombobulating to not know what could be coming your way. Still, the unknown aspect of change must be acknowledged.
- View change as “the spice of life.” There’s an old saying based on something the poet, William Cowper, wrote that states, “Variety is the spice of life.” If you can apply that attitude to how you see change, your whole approach to it will be different.
- Notice that a wider array of choices often accompanies change. Along with change often come more options. A whole new world opens up, in a sense. You’re in a position to take advantage of new choices.
There is an amazing course offered by Gregg Braden, where you will learn to tap into your innate capacity to leap beyond self-limiting thoughts and behaviors and step into the grandest vision of the life you once thought was beyond your reach. The course is called Human By Design, and if I’m honest, I highly recommend anything by Gregg Braden!
If you shift how you regard changes, you’ll feel more comfortable with them. Accepting change, viewing change as progress, recognizing there will be unknowns, and embracing the newness of change will help you get ready for change.
If you can see change as transformative, notice that it creates more choices for you, view it as “the spice of life,” and remind yourself that you can adjust to anything that happens, you’ll approach change more positively. Now you can go forward into the next change with an open mind!
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