Once a year, we place a great emphasis on being goal orientated. As if deep in our psyche, we all have agreed to treat the turning over of a year as the golden opportunity to ride a massive wave of momentum. This wave seems to come and go and too many of us are left to settle for last year’s outdated bad habits that perpetuate the same frustrations.
If you want to ride this wave wisely, the surfboard and technique are your responsibility. The illusion of lack may have sold us the idea that the time to be most committed to important change is the New Year. The notion that this time offers the biggest wave, for ending bad habits and beginning positive new ones, is misinformed. That wave is really best created from within us and falling of the board and getting back on it quickly is a natural part of the process of lasting change.
While seizing the New Year to motivate change can work well from a ritualistic sense, we tend to push the daily opportunities to seize our moments out of sight and mind. If you are doing well staying focused on your New Year’s resolutions, congratulations! If you have begun to dilute your new habits, edging slowly back into the old ways of being, this is the time to realise that no New Year was ever going to make the difference. It was only you.
So what can you do about it?
To help you get back and balanced on that surfboard, here are some handy tips to re-align your environment internally and externally.
- Revisit why you are doing this. Make a fresh list of all the benefits awaiting you once you develop your new habits for good.
- Break up your goals into measurable milestones and set up a reward system you can honour your commitments with.
- Write a few pages as if you are already 3 months into the future. Describe how great your life is because you stayed true to your action plan. Cover how you feel, how relationships and circumstances have improved.
- Identify individuals and situations that tempt you back into your old habits. Negotiate support or avoid them for the time it will take to lock in the new habits.
- Mark a date with a friend to celebrate your achievement in 3 months time and count down to that date in your diary to keep you aware motivated and accountable.
Looking forward to hearing about how you made your 2012 New Year’s resolutions stick!
George Helou is a best selling author, the founder of www.mindpowercoach.com and a life coach residing in Perth. For more information, contact [email protected]
George Helou is a Life Coach based in Perth, Western Australia. He is the founder of EP7 – a 7 step Empowered for Purpose personal development process used in coaching, training courses and workshop retreats. He is also the author of two successful books.
He can be contacted through http://www.mindpowercoach.com
