Setting New Year Resolutions (Part 1)

Getting ready for the New Year? Started making New Year resolutions? Great! Now for some sobering news.  92% of New Year’s resolutions won’t be kept. Failure usually comes fast and furious with about half of those resolutions being abandoned within the first month of the year. As a result many give up setting goals altogether which is always a worse resolution than setting one and failing at it (more on that in a future post).

But it leads all of us to ask “Where’s our resolve?” I can understand and accept a certain percentage of failure but 92% is ridiculous. With the year coming to an end, how do you set New Year Resolutions (NYRs) that you can keep with you over a life time?

Success starts with a willingness to spend more time planning for life in general. There’s a general rule that “Failing to plan is planning to fail”. The bottom line is NYRs or no NYRs you are still planning. Then if that’s the case there’s no better time than doing this now at the end of the year and almost at the beginning of a new one. From a life and business coaching conference I took a while back (review notes below), I learned to call such a time “reflection time”.

And so a few years back I started taking a day before thanksgiving to be alone, reflect and plan. And because year to year I should be placing a high value on seeing different aspects of my life improve, I look at where and why I succeeded or failed. Immediately after I come back I set out to implement the changes I want to see happen going into the new year. I combine this with monthly review times where I spend about half a day to tweak  or at times overhaul the process.

So here are the three questions to consider in the first part and next week I’ll point out the  five critical things you want to consider as you make your new year resolutions.

1    WHY? Why have the resolution in the first place? The 8% of those who keep their NYRs, have a very strong why they need to make and keep the resolution. I always start by asking myself what’s the point of the resolution I intend on keeping. Why do I need to change and where does the intention for change come from? i.e Am I changing because of a conviction I have or is it because my friends, tv ads or some outside pressure that is making me feel like I need to change? In most of the NYRs I have failed at, I was influenced by an outside presence and not because of a conviction I had. I can tell you that the NYR looked good and exciting at the time but when the proverbial rubber met the road, it came crushing down and I ended up wasted plenty of time, energy and money.

      

      What will it cost me? No resolution that is made and kept that is free. It will cost you precious time, money, relationships. I always make sure I understand that cost and if I’m willing to live with paying that cost. It’s not just the cost to me personally but there are others who are dear in my life that will pay a price for my NYRs. Is this a fair cost for them to incur? Then there’s the cost that few people pay attention to. The activities that need to be stopped so as to allow for a new resolution to take hold. Remember that time restrictions is the second reason why most resolutions fail. Nowadays, in my reflection time I take time to decide what I need to stop doing. I found there are always plenty of those that need stopping.

   

      What’s the benefit? So if I succeed what do I have to gain. This has to go far beyond feeling good about myself. A few years back I made a resolution to change my diet. Sure there are obvious health benefits but far more important to me was setting an example for my kids and doing what I can to be healthy during the years my kids will be adults. I dream of the day that God-willing  I will be fortunate to run a marathon with my kids. With that dream in the back of my head, the sacrifice of giving up read meat, drastically cutting down on sugar, salt and white flour became a very small price to pay.

At the end of the day, we have this one life to live. Live it on purpose and be proactive with it even at the cost of failing on some plans. Don’t just decide to take up something in the new year without taking through the filter of the above questions. And if you deem it’s worth doing then do it without any reservations since you get to do it in this one and only life.

How do you make sure you live up to the filtered NYRs? That’s a question I’ll answer in next week’s post.

So what have you tried that worked that we can all learn from?
I’d love to hear from you. To learn more about what we do and how we can help, please visit us at http://lantelsystems.com or 
email me at bernard@lantelsystems.com
We provide affordable and secure cloud computing solutions to many entrepreneurs, businesses in different industries and government agencies. Our data centers are independently audited not just for availability but for security and most of all we have the references and the clients to prove it.




Bernard Wambugu

Notes:
The life and business coaching conference is hosted yearly by Building Champions http://buildingchampions.com/