So you haven’t kept your New Year’s resolution…
Monday, March 5th, 2007
So it’s already March and you’re realizing you didn’t keep up with your New Year’s resolution for even two weeks. Maybe your diet plan was undercut by too much stress and too little time, or your resolution to exercise daily was compromised when you pulled a muscle (which still hasn’t healed) by trying to do an hour on the StairMaster on January 1st. Your desire to organize faded away when you realized you couldn’t even find the things you’d wanted to organize. You’re at a bit of a loss, to say the least!
No worries–struggling with your New Year’s resolution is normal. After all, you’re trying to enact a major lifestyle change–something that’s difficult to do under any circumstances, much less with the added pressure of maintaining that lifestyle change forever. I think I’ve been successful (so far, at least) with my resolution because it’s a one-time thing. Yeah, I have to train for it, but once the marathon is over, I can go back to being a couch potato if I want to. While I secretly hope that my body won’t want to revert to couch potato-ism once I get a feel for what it’s like to really be in shape, I’m heading into the marathon with the understanding that my goal is a marathon, not a lifetime of fitness. That kind of makes things easier.
So how can you get back on track with your New Year’s resolution if you’ve spent January and February working too much overtime, indulging in hot fudge sundaes, and endlessly channel-surfing? One thing that might help is to make a more short-term, time-sensitive goal. That is, rather than thinking of your New Year’s resolution as “eating right” for the rest of your life, decide that you’re going to have half as many desserts as usual for the month of March. Or make up your mind to leave work by 5:30 each day, no matter what your boss says and no matter how many projects are still sitting on your desk.
Focusing on one specific behavior instead of all the myriad behaviors involved in a more vague resolution makes it much easier to actually accomplish something. If I’d “decided” to run a marathon without choosing a training plan, there’s no way I would have stuck with it. Essentially, rather than resolving to run a marathon, I resolved to complete a marathon training plan. Six months of regular training are, in a sense, a much bigger feat than the marathon itself! I probably could have completed a marathon without training, but I would have walked much of it and been in pretty bad shape at the end. By sticking to my training regimen, I’m ensuring that my marathon experience will be a positive one, not 26.2 miles of pure pain (though I’m sure a lot of pain will be involved!).
Break it down if you need to. Forget the idea of a New Year’s resolution. Make a daily resolution or a weekly resolution that can add up to a monthly resolution. But DON’T give up on your goals just because you’ve struggled thus far. You have 10 more months for improvement in 2007. Use them to achieve as much as you possibly can!
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