Four Sure-Fire Ways to Keep New Year’s Resolutions

By Carol McClain:    @carol_mcclain

Everyone’s busy making New Year’s resolutions–perhaps, as this is written, they’ve already been broken.

 

 

What are you hoping for? Lose weight? Start exercising? Spend more time with your kids? Read the Bible through in a year? Save your marriage?

All of these are great ideas, and I’m sure you can add a litany of them yourself. As 2018 goes, we’ll probably have as much success as last year or 2010 or 2000. First and foremost, make your resolutions doable.

Here are surefire ways to keep your resolutions

  1. Start small. Say over fifty years of living, you’ve gotten to be fifty pounds overweight. To say you’re going to lose the weight in a month–or maybe even a year, dooms you to failure. Break down this worthy goal into manageable bites. Lose a half-pound a week. Wait, you scream. A half pound would take forever. However, you can maintain a half pound consistently. By the end of the year, you’ll have lost, twenty-six pounds–half your goal. You will have instilled good eating and exercise patterns, and next year you’ll lose the rest. If you try to lose it all in a month with a fad diet, you’ll lose nothing and probably gain.
  2. Choose goals you can control. Need to spend more time with your kids? Don’t resolve to take them on an outing once a week. Choose to spend an hour more a week with them. Spread that time out over the week. Find innovative ways–read to them at dinner time, sit them on your lap as they watch Sesame Street. These can be done.
  3. Seek help. Do you have a trusted friend? Perhaps this should be your resolution–to cultivate a friendship. Have someone keep you accountable. This is why programs like Weight Watchers or family counseling or personal trainers or gym memberships work. We need to be accountable. Woe unto him who is alone, the Bible says. When we fall, no one helps us right our ways.
  4. Make sure your resolutions are worthwhile. We’re not going to keep a frivolous resolution. Running a marathon, curling our hair every day, making your bed before seven a.m. don’t mean much without a purpose–a reason. None of these are silly in themselves (except the bed making). If they hold no tangible reward for you, you will not keep them.

Don’t fail. Make resolutions you can keep.

1 Comment

  1. Barry says:

    Clear, simple, common sense advice. No magic pills. The KISS principle still stands. Nice article.

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