Yes, you heard me right. Stop making New Year’s Resolutions, and start changing your life.
There’s little wonder why such a dramatic stigma surrounds the “New Year Crew” crowd. Gyms will be packed for a month or two, maybe some of the trendy health food stores will have packed parking lots, and in the worst case, the practicing resolutioner will ramble on endlessly over Facebook about how committed they are to their resolution.
But these people are all making a change for the better, right? At least, they’re attempting to, and that should be encouraged.
What should not be encouraged, however, corresponds with the tragic reality implicit with the very notion of a New Year’s Resolution: they are temporary. In the worst case, those who undertake this challenge to themselves may last a week or two before they forego their gym membership in favor of a “beer of the month” club.
That’s the “New Year's Crew” gets such a bad rap. They put in the motions, and heck, they may even put in every ounce of effort that they can… for a while. Then, once around two months have has passed, so has the group of people that were apparently so eager to change their lives for the better.
In the best case, the eager and dedicated will last the full year that they promised to themselves, or reach whatever goal they had set in the beginning.
So, what’s wrong with that? Complacency, the excuse of “rewarding” oneself, leading down a road that will lead to countless resolutions to come, the notion that once they achieve X, things will automatically be better… The list of possibilities is endless.
The problem here is simple: real change takes time, and more importantly, maintaining those changes means maintaining the same efforts that got you there in the first place. There are countless reasons as to why people may fail their specific resolutions, but in reality, the system itself is what’s setting people up for failure.
Now, I’m not here to tell you that everything about New Year’s Resolutions is bad. Far from it, actually. Much like setting any solidified goal in life, such things serve as motivational kickstarts needed to make positive changes in one’s life. Above all else, they can be useful for creating habits, and it’s habits that are truly essential to success in the long-term.
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