I gave up making New Year’s Resolutions a few years back when I realized that they rarely, if ever, work. How many times have you made a honking great resolution, only to see it creep back into your life a few months, if not weeks, later? How often have you got around to December 31st and looked back over the past year and congratulated yourself for sticking to that New Year Resolution that you made last December?
The reason they didn’t work for me was because they were all about giving something up for an entire year, which is utterly impossible for most mortals. Give up sugar for a year? Exercise every single day for an entire year? And thus I set myself up to fail, and ended up feeling really bad about myself. And those little failures can add up to a bigger (and more insidious) belief, that I am useless, weak, have no willpower etc. Pile onto that the sense of shame at having failed again, the whole thing becomes redundant.
And yet we keep on making them because we start a New Year full of hope, right? We hope we can stick to that diet, meditate everyday, not judge our loved ones, stop shopping for shoes online, switch off our phones for moments of calm, but two weeks in, the resolve starts to topple.
I don’t want to throw away the hope and expectation of positive change and growth – it’s what we’ll all here to do, right? But I do want to share a secret with you about how I manage to stick to my intentions (most of the time): I don’t try to do anything for a year. Actually, I don’t try to do it for even a week. Nope, I only try to do it for one day. The reason is that one day is doable. This is how I have achieved everything that I’ve ever done in my life. I never made a resolution that I would become a writer by writing every single day of the year. Or that I would get healthy by giving up certain unhealthy foods for an entire year. Instead, I created a short term goal: I will sit down today and write 5 pages, or I will not eat sugar today, or I will exercise past my comfort zone just for today…because TODAY is all I have.
I am guaranteed success by keeping all my goals and resolutions in the day. And each day’s success builds on the next until before I know it I actually do have a year of days of living my life to the best and the fullest. It’s way easier this way, and the reason why I refuse to make traditional New Year’s Resolutions anymore.
So, what are your goals and intentions today? Here’s a tip: When you wake up each morning, grab a notebook and write out your intentions for this day. At the end of the day, check them off. This, I know, you can do:)
