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Do you make New Year’s Resolutions? Do you stick with them? Maybe you are like most people and have given up completely; why bother making a resolution that you know you won’t keep? There’s no sense in getting depressed when you can just avoid it altogether, right?
New Year’s Resolutions are daunting. Committing to anything for 365 days is asking a lot. There are only a few things that I can think of that I committed to for a year and actually stuck with.
One that comes to mind is breastfeeding. Thankfully, my daughter is an obvious prompter to continue and not give up but you know what? She’s the first kid that I’ve successfully breastfed for a year. It took a lot of hard work in the beginning.
Most importantly, I took it day by day, month by month. In fact, there’s a forum that I frequent and the breastfeeding mom’s have decided to award ourselves with “medals” for how long we breastfeed. (I just earned my “gold” by the way.) It’s a silly thing but it’s something to strive for (and for the record, the awards aren’t to make ourselves superior to those who didn’t breastfeed as long or at all; it’s simply to give us something for the hard work that breastfeeding is.)
All that to say, committing to something for a year is hard, committing to something for a week or month is much more doable and realistic.
Ditching The New Year’s Resolutions
This New Years, why not ditch the year resolution and instead make monthly or weekly goals? For instance, say you want to start eating better (in resolution talk this would likely be called “lose weight”.)
Instead of lumping all things healthy into one large daunting goal, why not break it up? For January commit to drinking at least 8 glasses of water, for February commit to exercising 3 days a week and so on. Every month you will add one new goal.
The nice thing is that it takes 28 days to form a habit. Therefore, by the time you are ready to make next month’s commitment, you won’t really be accumulating commitments. Instead, you will acquire the new goal and a new habit; you won’t have a list of goals to do, just the one new one.
Can’t handle a month commitment? Try breaking it up even smaller; try weekly! I suggest still making a monthly goal and then sub-dividing.
For example, if you want to rid your bathroom of all non-natural products in a month, try dividing it into four segments: 1 week shower products, 1 week makeup, 1 week mouth products, and the last week anything else still sitting in your bathroom drawers! That’s not too bad!
In 12 months time, you will hopefully accomplished 12 mini goals and changed your life much more then you would have if you had set a New Year’s Resolution and failed by February (because, let’s be honest that’s what we would do.)
This New Years ditch the resolutions and make 12 monthly. You will be surprised at how much you will accomplish!
Want some monthly ideas? Check out my Going Natural: One Month at a Time post.
