Are You Sure You Want To Make New Year’s Resolutions This Year?
I have written before about why New Year’s resolutions fail and have proposed many success strategies and solutions in my books to help you to make them work, this time.
The main premises are that you have to write down either one big goal or no more than three small goals, design an accountability action plan, get the right kind of support, reroute if your first plan doesn’t work, and keep experimenting until you get the formula right and the results you want. For people who are willing to do these steps with goals they truly want, victory can be theirs. But the stats are terrible–most people have spaced out on their intentions by March or much sooner. Worse yet, they often set the same goals year after year. So if you are not willing to do what it takes, please do not set goals this year.
Why do I say that? Aren’t we supposed to keep trying to grow and improve ourselves? Isn’t positive change worth aspiring to? Of course, but if we don’t want the results that we say we want in our whole being, in our gut, in our bones, and in our heart, we don’t have the emotional power to succeed. If we continually set ourselves up to fail, the price is our self-esteem. That is too high a price to risk. We need high self-esteem to negotiate our way through this matrix of a world that we live in. If we cannot keep our promises to ourselves, our word becomes tenuous, and we lose trust in ourselves. When we can’t trust ourselves, we feel ungrounded and the world becomes a scary place. Many years ago when I took EST, we learned about the power of promises and the psychic toxicity of not keeping them. Since then I try really hard not to promise something I cannot deliver–my integrity is one of my core values since one of my life purposes is being a Mentor.
Change is challenging, especially in the context of a global community where information doubles every few years. Change is uncomfortable–it smarts.
It brings up fears of all varieties. I have a client now who is writing an important book. She cut back her current workload, put money aside for this project, set up a writing space and a writing schedule, alerted her family and friends that she needed to focus on her project and has me and a success buddy in place for support. All fabulous positive choices. Yet, she can’t get started. She is paralyzed, an unusual feeling for a brilliant woman. We dug around during our coaching and she has old ghosts in her brain who told her she didn’t have the gift. She wonders if they are right, even though she journals everyday. We all get slammed for self-expression sometime–everyone has a story. Yet my client has a message for the world and she wants to start with a book and you don’t have to write a book by yourself. She has passion which is a key catalyst for empowerment. What she needs now is to find her identity as a writer who completes her work so that she can finish this book in nine months as planned.
New Year’s resolutions are not just about finding the right health club or the best diet or a new career. They are about a new identity, a transformation, whether large or small. Dancing with a resolution and ending up on stage having mastered it, changes who you are and how you hold yourself. Failure to meet our goals is rarely about laziness, it is about earning to let go of who we were and becoming someone stronger and more esteemed, by ourselves.
