No to New Year’s Resolutions

11 Jan No to New Year’s Resolutions

Pat Yourself on the Back if You Didn’t Make Them, Says Andro Donovan Author of Motivate Yourself – Get the Life You Want, Find Purpose and Achieve Fulfilment.

I have two words for people who didn’t decide to join a gym, lose five pounds, eat less chocolate or be nicer to their in-laws for the New Year: Well done!

Resolutions are dramas waiting to happen. They are expectations that you are going to fail after your good intentions peter out.

Instead of going the superficial route and making new years resolutions that you know will be short lived and probably broken, making a deeper, more conscious commitment to self-improvement throughout the year will pay dividends. Keeping an internal dialogue going and asking yourself: How am I doing? Am I happy? Am I taking the time to listen to the wisdom of my own inner voice? These deeper questions will steer you onto a more fulfilling path.

21st-century distractions and information overload make it tougher for us to pay attention to our internal wisdom, which as director Steven Spielberg has pointed out, never shouts at us but only ever whispers. Without access to this internal voice, people remain unaware of who they are, what they want from life and where they should be focusing their energy. Listen to your inner voice, it has wisdom and knows you and what you need to focus on to experience more meaning and purpose.

So instead of resolving to do this or that, a gentle steering of oneself toward goals is required. What works is a desire or intention to slightly steer yourself in the direction you want to go, and a gentle moving away from what didn’t work in your life last year. Gentle, soft changes rather than hard resolutions with unachievable deadlines. The failure to achieve these hard resolutions conspire with your inner critic to confirm the negative inner belief ‘I can’t win, I have no willpower…’

My Top Tips to avoid New Year resolution disappointment, read the below, write your thoughts down, listen to your inner voice, be kind to yourself.

• Review the highlights of your year and internalize the elements that nourished you about those experiences.
• Register the core values that were activated during these highs e.g. contribution, recognition, love
• Envision how you could magnify these experiences moving forward and activate more of these values during 2017
• Remember what you are most grateful for
• Ask yourself how you are honoring these aspects of your life so as to not take them for granted
• Focus on one new area of development for the first quarter eg. spend more time with your family, invest in your health , improve your fitness, empower your management team, improve your leadership skills…..
• Plan one holiday for 2017 and book it now. This will give you something positive to look forward to.
• Define what’s essential in your life that gives you energy, purpose and meaning and make sure you prioritise these areas and activities.

Taking these simple steps will ensure you follow a more meaningful path this year.

Good luck and remember you always have a choice- choose to be happy.