We pray that 2023 will be a great year that will bring many blessings to you and your family.
Did you make any New Year's resolutions this year? I gave that up long time ago. It never seemed to work for me. According to a study of 1500 Americans, the top three resolutions of the previous year were: exercise more (58%), losing weight (48%), and saving more money (44%). Among these categories there were many more. Improving diet (39%) was one of them, spending more time with family (18%), spending less time on social media was another (13%), volunteering more and doing charity work was (10%) and cutting down on drinking was (4%), but quit drinking altogether was only (2%).
I found the list very interesting for many reasons. The top two deal with how we look and how we feel, rather than how we behave or interact with others. Self oriented rather than other people oriented. Nothing wrong with wanting to exercise more, lose weight and eat better. We all need to do that. However, I see a lot of people drinking excessively and sometimes that leads to bad behavior. Also, many people spend more on their cell phones than spending time with family, and yet they don't feel they need any improvement in that area of their lives. As I mentioned earlier, it seems like we are a society of more "self" oriented, than "others" oriented, just my opinion. I think we have a lot of room for improvement in the second category.
Another thing I thought about is that the reason most of our New Year's "resolutions" get abandoned by February, is because we are too vague. Instead of setting specific, doable goals, we set goals that are too general and too hard to achieve.
Lose weight..OK..how much and by when. Save more money..OK..how much more exactly and from where? Exercise more..wonderful, but where, when and what kind of exercise. We start with goals that are too big, too ambitious, and none specific, and then we fail. we fail because we cannot attain them. I have been there way too many times. So what do we do?
- Pick one or two specific goals and make it realistic. Instead of saying lose 100lbs, say 10lbs and work on that. Make a detailed plan, and small steps will get you there.
- Avoid repeating past failures and don't make the same resolution year after year.If you already tried and failed, you will not have confidence that you will achieve your goal this time either, except IF you evaluate what you did and how it failed. Evaluate what worked and what didn't work. Use a new strategy if you still want to tackle the same resolution.
- Be patient with yourself. You can restart and keep going until you have achieved that goal.
- Find someone who will support you, or work with a "buddy" who also has the same goals.
- Keep a journal (that doesn't always work for me) by jotting down your successes and struggles. Jot down what worked and what didn't work, and adjust your process accordingly.
- Don't give up..Remember it was the turtle who won the race, not the hare.
