It's that time of year again, where everyone commits to all those things that are supposed to help make their a better person, and then they quit by February. It's a tradition as old as time, but people keep doing because they keep wanting to be better, don't understand a way to do it that works.
I know because I am the same way.
I've tried the New Year's resolution thing before, and, like most people, I failed.
But why do we fail at our resolutions?
Well, we mostly fail because we make a commitment we can't stick with. We decided, much like in the cover image of this article, that we are going to make a bunch of changes at once, and then we fail at one of them. After we fail the first part, then we decide we are going to try again next year and we give up on the rest of our resolutions.
An experience that all, or at the very least 99% of us, have had moments in life where we fail, so we decided to just quit. We quit because once we are done, we remember how much easier it was to live life without sticking to our resolutions. We quit because it's easy.
But the thing is (to anyone who knows me personally, you're welcome), we CAN make New Year's resolutions work. We just have to make a resolution that is attainable, and stick with it even if we fail once.
Think about it like this, if you want to commit to something like going to bed earlier, don't resolve to try and go to bed at 10, if you were going to bed at midnight before. If you were going to go to bed at midnight, try going to bed at 11:30 first.
With New Year's resolutions, we try to do it all at once, but when we make one giant change, we tend to want to quit more. Big changes take small changes if we want the big changes to stick.
With your New Year's resolutions this year, find a goal you want to achieve and figure out if you can reach that goal with one change. If that one change is too big, find a smaller change for January and stick to that. Then make a change in February that gets you closer to the goal, and keep making those small change over the course of the year,
Who knows, maybe if you make all the small changes to meet your resolution, it might just survive the year.
