Hands up if you’ve ever kept a New Year’s resolution?
If your hand is up – I salute you. Every year, I make a New Year’s resolution and every year, I promptly forget about it completely by the 3rd of January. I can’t even remember what I promised myself last year but I imagine it was probably something to do with eating more vegetables. Boring.
The problem is that so many of us decide on resolutions that are either incredibly vague or far too idealistic, without a view of how said resolution may come about.
Any of these sound familiar? “I will lose weight. I will eat better. I will be happier. I will relax more. I will sleep more.”
And then life gears up and returns to frantic mode. We slip out of our holidays and revert to our old habits of eating badly and skipping the gym and bailing on friends to watch back-to-back episodes of Gilmore Girls (even though we’ve seen all the seasons about six times each). And we beat ourselves up about not keeping those resolutions that we looked upon so idealistically on the 1st of January.
So here are a couple of things to remember:
1) Nobody is perfect.
Literally no-one. I am the health and fitness editor and yet I am writing this while sitting on my bed at 1:30am, eating my way through a packet of Maltesers. Recognise that you should not aim for complete perfection and don’t beat yourself up if you don’t reach those goals. But if you don’t reach them – also don’t give up. It’s way too easy to throw things away and much harder to actually continue along – but you’ll be so proud of yourself if you do.
2) Specific goals work better than vague goals.
Come up with just ONE thing you’d like to achieve. Or maybe just ONE thing you’d like to start doing. Figure out exactly how you’re going to do said thing. Work out any complications that might arise, and do your best to resolve them before-the-fact.
