Are your New Year’s resolutions just not sticking?
If you found yourself a few hours, a few days, a few weeks into January 2022 with a lofty (or not so lofty) New Years Resolution, and you panicked, I’ve got you.
If your Dry January ended on Saturday, January 1st at 5 pm, not to worry.
If your goal to journal came to a screeching halt because the beautiful gold edged leather-bound journal and pen set you impulse-bought right before Christmas got accidentally thrown out while panic cleaning between the Christmas Eve company, gift opening on Christmas morning, and subsequent re-clean before the Christmas Day evening company arrived, do not fret.
New Year’s Resolutions and taking time to reflect as one year closes and another begins is AMAZING! It provides us the opportunity to really decide what is important. To let go of what did not serve us and make a plan to move forward towards things that do.
All that being said, resolutions can also create an unrealistic dialogue in those tiny corners of our conscience that we visit in the middle of the night when we can’t sleep, or when we are slightly hungover (which tends to happen with more frequency around the holidays), or while riding the high of the holidays.
So as you find yourself a few weeks into 2022, maybe a little depressed, or your pants fitting a little tighter because holiday sweet treats rolled into January comfort food, I invite you to take a beat, reassess, and recommit.
Because the truth of it is, successes are pretty much ALWAYS preceded by a great many failures.
Step 1: Assess the goal.
What led to you being not-so-successful at the start of the year?
Was your goal too broad or aspirational?
If you set out to “Lose 30 pounds in 30 days,” maybe change it to “Take a 20 minute walk and lift weights 3 days a week.” Maybe “Dry-January” morphs into “Cut out at-home cocktails during the week.”
Was it just plain out-of-left-field, and you need to scrap it?
Then DO IT! Draw a line through it. Better yet, scribble it out. If it no longer serves you, let it go! You’ve never been a reader but committed to a book club that is reading a 500-page historical fiction epic for the month of January, and you haven’t even cracked the book yet? Drop out of the book club.
Copy and paste the following:
Thanks so much for including me, but I don’t want to read this book. I hope you all enjoy it. I look forward to finding out what happens in the movie version.
Kindly and with Love,
(insert name)
Step 2: Set a new start date.
January 1st didn’t work out. So what? Maybe it was due to a lack of preparation. So give yourself that prep time now. If you need to shop or cook or purge things from your house, set a date in the future to complete the task, and then set your start date for the next day. And if that has to be rescheduled, that is okay too. Pat yourself on the back for your resilience and ability to adapt to change, and move it to a date that serves you and sets you up for success.
Step 3: Give yourself permission to restart as many times as necessary.
See above:
Successes are preceded by a great many failures.
Steps 1 and 2 can be washed, rinsed, and repeated as you see fit.
