Well, it's that time of year again... when most people break their New Year's resolutions.
Today's message is especially dedicated to Anthony Guidotti in Columbus, NJ, Frank "Tank" Sconzo in Trenton, NJ, Cheryl Verros in Philadelphia, PA, and Christina Cavanagh in Hamilton, NJ.
On Jan. 1, countless people are determined to improve their lives. "This is MY year," they say. The most common resolutions are: to lose weight, eat better, get organized, and save more money. If you belong to a fitness center, in early January, you see so many new faces, and by the end of the month, they are nowhere to be found. This breaking of resolutions is an amazing phenomenon. Here's how you do it.
1. Believe that little negative voice inside your head. We all have that little voice inside our head. (If you're thinking, "Do I have a little voice inside my head?"... THAT'S the voice I'm talking about). Most people believe and act on the voice that says, "I'll just skip today's workout" or "There's no way I can keep this up," and thus the downward spiral.
2. Blame circumstances, situations, or your environment for your feelings and actions. Some common reasons why individuals break their resolutions are: "My boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife keeps so much junk food in the house," or "I'm always on the go, so I can't eat healthy," or "None of my friends want to workout with me." When you think that something outside of you can affect your behavior and feelings, you are a prisoner of those "things" and will be until those "things" change.
3. Act how you feel. Most people act how they feel, so when they don't feel like cleaning, they make up reasons why they can skip, or negotiate with themselves to make an exception. If people lose their "feeling" of motivation, they try to wait until it comes back. Oftentimes it never does.
4. Let resolutions govern you. When you allow resolutions to govern you, then you will be so focused on achieving that goal that you lose sight of other (potentially better) opportunities, and you certainly will not enjoy the process. This makes it extremely difficult to stick with it.
So now that you know what NOT to do, here are four ideas on "how to" have your best year yet (whether you decide to keep your resolutions, or not).
1. The most successful people in the world also have that little negative voice, but they have a different relationship to that voice. Everyone has negative and insecure thoughts that enter their heads, but the ones who are consistently successful, are the ones who know that the voice is normal and random, and that they do not need to stress out or take action when it arises. I know supermodels and world champions that have that voice too, so if they have that little negative voice, you will to from time to time, and that's okay. It's not the voice, it's your reaction to it.
2. Circumstances, situations, and our environment CANNOT affect how we feel, or act. If that were true, than every affluent child would become rich and successful and every child in an inner city would not. The only thing that can affect our feelings and behavior is our own thinking, therefore we are in control, not our situation or environment.
3. If I acted according to how I felt, there would be days where I would not even get out of bed. I give numerous lectures every year, and I get nervous before every single one of them, whether it is in front of five or 5,000 people. To me it's just nervous thinking and totally normal, and my mind tends to reset back to clarity on its own.
4. Resolutions should guide us, not govern us. There's nothing wrong with tweaking or even deciding not to continue a resolution if we see an even better direction to head in. Resolutions should help us get inspired, and feel more alive, not numb and closed-minded so that all we are focused on is that goal. People don't sing to get to the end of the song, do they? Besides, we don't even know if we'll truly be happy when we reach our "goal." So what if we decided to just throw our hearts and souls into everything that we do for one day... and then just do it 365 times?
Let's face it... people make resolutions because of how they THINK they will feel when they make those changes in their life. That feeling is happiness.
Guess what?
Happiness is always available to you (resolutions broken, or not).
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