How to Stick to New Year's Resolutions

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Make sure the biggest obstacle to achieving your resolution isn't you.

Panama City Beach, FL (PRWEB) January 10, 2014

Making a New Year’s resolution is easy. Staying on track to achieving it is where the real challenge begins. The longer the journey to fulfilling your resolution, the less likely you will be to do the little things along the way to achieve it. Here are three tips that will significantly strengthen your ability to stick with your plan and succeed.

1) Fall in love with the journey -- A resolution is not something you should enter into without careful thought. Many require changes to daily life that can be disruptive in the short-term, until they become a natural part of your life. If you want the end result, your resolution, yet loathe the journey you will have to make to achieve it, your commitment will be shallow at best. For example, losing weight is a wildly popular resolution; however, many quickly give up because they don’t love the process of getting there, such as exercise and dietary changes.

To fall in love with your journey, find exercises and healthy foods that appeal to you, so you will be more likely to stick with them for the long haul. Loving your journey ignites your drive, commitment, and motivation to say goodbye to the old, embrace the new, and remain focused way past experiencing the results of your efforts.

2) Do it for you -- Resolutions made to satisfy someone are shallow and leave you less motivated to do what it takes to fulfill them. When you resolve to do something because you really want it, your drive, attitude, creativity, and motivation to accomplish it emanate from deep within, making it easier to stick to the program when you encounter obstacles and those who say you won’t succeed.

3) Get out of your own way -- Make sure the biggest obstacle to achieving your resolution isn’t’ you. Negative and unsupportive self-talk can silently sabotage the grandest of resolutions by unraveling your motivation, self-confidence, and will to succeed. Self-talk is what you think and say about you and what you are doing, both in your head and in conversation with others.

Keep negative self-talk in check by first becoming and remaining intimately aware of what you are thinking and saying about you and the actions necessary to reach your resolution. Second, just stop yourself from thinking and saying negative things about you. And third, replace random unsupportive dialogue with intentional self-talk that is positive and supportive of you and the actions taken to fulfill resolutions.

Positive self-talk is a tremendous tool for building and maintaining a strong attitude, motivating you through adversity, strengthening focus, boosting energy and self-confidence, and supporting the actions you take to reach goals. Using words like "difficult" or "hard" to describe the actions you have to take creates unnecessary mental road blocks that promote procrastination and giving up.

4) Approach adversity with an open mind -- Adversity is one of the main reasons people abandon their resolutions. Managing it effectively, by realizing you have a choice as to how or whether you respond to every situation, will help you save your personal resources for achieving your resolutions.

You can avoid many of the pitfalls of adversity by minimizing "self-generated" direct adversity, like negative self-talk, and paying attention to your commitment of personal resources to indirect adversity---things happening to others that you cannot change. Constantly commiting personal resources to indirect adversity takes time, inhibits creativity, drains energy, derails focus, detracts your attention, deflates your motivation, and negatively affects your will to see your resolution through. Choosing to see personal adversity as an opportunity to learn and grow will keep the path to fulfilling your resolution less obstructed.

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