Think about it, every December you get asked “What new year resolutions do you intend making for next year?” and if you are like the majority out there you will inwardly groan and probably trot out a standard resolution that you hear being spouted by nearly

everyone else! But then you do actually start to think of all the things you should change. You might need to lose weight, stop smoking, earn more money, get out of debt, have a good relationship, take up a college course or do a night class in the hopes of getting a promotion or even a job. Then you decide that you’ve far too many items on your list and you couldn’t possibly do all of them, they’d all take up far too much of your time and your hard-earned cash and so you pick the hardest one or two of them and decide that if you get even one of them done, well you’ll have made some progress! Sound familiar?

Of course none of them will happen! You might get started on one or two of them and with a great deal of gusto too, great plans and lots of motivation. Give it a week or two and the motivation starts to slid off, gain pace until it comes to a complete stop! You are not seeing the weight loss you wanted to see as fast as you wanted to see it, or all the food you eat tastes like cardboard, you sniff longingly as someone smoking passes you and have to make a fist in your pocket so as not to grab the cigarette from them – and you don’t know what to do with your hands anymore, you have a very, very short fuse, a nasty cough and everyone is avoiding you like the plague, this used not happen when you smoked! The government has introduced more ways to take your money from you so your income is lower, the dole queue is growing, who is going to give you a second job when there are unemployed people out there, and you’d rather stay in the job you have than risk a better paid job that might not last the probation period! You’ve been on a few nights out already and the same oldfaces keep cropping up and they are either already in relationships looking

for a little extra on the side – so not available, or they don’t meet the criteria you have stored in your head and much as you’d like a new relationship it’s just gotta be worth the effort. The college course costs more than you expected or doesn’t start until September. The night class again costs more that you thought or is not being held locally and you’ll have to travel, or the times don’t suit. So before you know it you are back to where you were at the end of December only now you are slightly annoyed with yourself. Add that to the mix and its little wonder we start to avoid new year resolutions.

Think of all the reasons why you make a resolution. What are you gaining from it? What will it cost you, in time, effort and money? How are you phrasing your resolution? Most of the resolutions we decide upon involve some sort of lack. Either we are going to lose weight, give up smoking, spend more time exercising (giving up our free time), get out of debt (curb our spending) go to college or night classes (again giving up our free time). When we decide to do that we have already started to self-sabotage our progress because we have encountered something that we have to do without in order to gain and we concentrate on what we have to give up a lot more than on our gain, because we can feel the lack now, the gain is some time in the future, it’s certainly not now!!

So instead of making new year resolutions decide on outcomes or goals that you would like to achieve by a set date. Set out the steps required to get there. Ask yourself if you have ever achieved this before, or something similar to this before, or has someone you know done it? If so think back to the steps you took then to achieve it, or ask that somebody what steps they took and implement them yourself. If it is something you’ve done before and not finished ask yourself what it was that stopped you? Was it a limiting belief or a series of them that you have had about yourself so that when you started to make progress your old limiting belief reared its ugly head and taunted you into quitting before you made real progress? Take note of that belief and question the truth of it. Ask

yourself what important changes need to happen within you for you to successfully achieve your goals, write them all down so you now have an idea of what you need to overcome and can decide which to overcome first. Do up an action plan of your goal.

It’s a lot like baking a cake really. You decide you want to bake say a madeira cake, so you buy a book with the recipe in it, you then make a list of the ingredients and bakeware required and go buy/borrow them, then you clear your workspace, follow the recipe instructions step by step and you find you have made up your cake mix, put it into a cake tin and put it in the oven to bake, after the alloted time you take it out and you have a madeira cake!. Your goals are achieved following the very same principle of baking a cake after you have overcome all the obstacles you have put in your way.