New You Resolutions 1260x542
31 Mar 2010

New you resolutions

2 mins to read
Already blown your fresh new start? It's never too late for ‘take two', writes motivational speaker and health expert Jennifer Jefferies.


There's something so tantalising about a new year. It's time to wipe the slate clean and start all over again, but this time doing everything perfectly, just the way we know we should.

So, we set ourselves a whole list of new year's resolutions and year after year expect that the magic of midnight will wipe away all our bad habits, end all our procrastinations and inject us with a new energy and focus. But it doesn't.

The first sign that our new year's promises aren't going to come easily is usually when we wake up on New Year's day, tired and hungover, rationalising that the best time to start any new regime is the 2nd of January, when life gets back to normal. And so begin the procrastinations and guilt-trips!

By February, many of us are looking forward to the next new year because we've quickly become caught up in the reality of day-to-day life, fallen back into our old habits, and realised that making real life changes is not as simple as making a wish on the stroke of midnight!

I gave up on setting new year's resolutions years ago after I realised that I had been setting myself the same goals year after year, and had never actually achieved any of them. I knew what I wanted, but somehow I just couldn't manage to create real and lasting changes, so I just dusted off the same list of resolutions every year and never got any closer to what I really desired.

The thing about new year's resolutions is that they too often feel like just another list of things we ‘should' do to ‘fix' ourselves, and haven't we already got enough to do and feel guilty about? Also, many of us set resolutions that are about making really big changes in our lives and changing long-standing behaviours – and that's not easy to do all at once and on our own, so we need a little help along the way.

The first thing we can do to make our new year's resolutions more achievable is to change the language we use to describe them. Try thinking of them as ‘new you resolutions', so rather than just being a list of things you want to make happen this year, you will start to think of them as permanent new habits and behaviours (that will become part of who you are).

The next thing is to write them down. If we want to change the way we've been doing things and start getting results, we need to give ourselves a very specific set of instructions about what we want to achieve and how we're going to achieve it. Then make a decision to read these instructions every single day.

Finally, enlist a support team to encourage you and help you to keep on track. This might be a trusted friend or family member that you share your goals with, or it might be an objective third party who can coach you through with a bit more assertiveness than your friends and family might be up for!

The great thing about new you resolutions is that you don't have to wait until the beginning of another year before you can start them, in fact, anytime that you decide enough is enough is the perfect time to begin.

Jennifer Jefferies is a naturopath, author and motivational speaker. To find out more about Jennifer, visit www.jenniferjefferies.com



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