How are Your Resolutions Going?
New Year’s is often a time of reflection and resolutions. All of us tend to examine where we are, and where we’re going. Often these reflections end in goals we’ve set for ourselves for the coming year.
These goals are based on health, income, experiences, anything really.
What we can forget though is if we want to achieve something we haven’t achieved before, we have to perform actions we haven’t performed before. Put another way, we have to change our behaviours.
Attempting to achieve a new outcome, by maintaining our current actions is akin to Einstein’s definition of insanity.
So depending when you’re reading this, we’re already into the new year. The question to ask yourself: are your current behaviours in alignment with your new goals?
How are your exercise behaviours to date? Are they different from last years? What about study habits? Are you reading more, less or the same as last year?
Changing your behaviours is simple, but not easy. Don’t beat yourself up if you’ve quickly fallen back into your old routine. Chances are, you may have unintentionally set yourself up for failure.
You may have set goals that required you to make sweeping changes in many aspects of your life. To achieve the goals, you set for yourself, the person you needed to be on January 1st may have bared little (if any) resemblance to who you were on December 31st.
It is almost impossible for you to change all your habits and behaviours immediately, but this doesn’t mean you cannot change at all. One of the the surest ways to achieve real and permanent change is to change incrementally.
Want to wake up 2 hours earlier? Begin by waking up 30 minutes earlier, then once this is a habit, make it 60, then 90 until your desired behaviour change is achieved.
Never read? Start by reading for 10 minutes at a time, unbroken. Once you can do this try 20 minutes, then 40, etc. You may find yourself reading for 2-3 hours at a time within weeks.
Incremental change of the right behaviours will see you on track to achieving your goals in no time.
If you’re already off track for the new year, this may be an opportunity to go back re-examine your goals an identify the changes you will need to make to have these goals become reality. Set a plan to begin incremental change from today.
