If you’re like many people, you made some New Year’s resolutions. And if you’re like most of those people, those New Year’s resolutions got left by the wayside about two weeks into January.
No big deal, right? There’s always next year!
Do yourself a favor and get the “there’s always next year” idea out of your head. Not because you don’t get a chance to try again next year – you absolutely do – but because you don’t have to wait at all. You can start taking another shot at your goals five minutes from now. Or tomorrow. Or next week.
Whenever you fall off the proverbial wagon, that’s when you have the chance to pick yourself up and try again.
If you’re having trouble with that idea, it’s probably for one of a relatively small number of reasons. Let’s look some over, shall we?
It’s not really your goal. This is huge. The fact that your family / spouse / kids want you to do something doesn’t magically create desire or motivation for you to do it. And the fact that you can’t summon that desire usually isn’t a good reason to count it as a failed resolution. Remember, other people aren’t living your life. They have great suggestions and advice sometimes, but you need to measure yourself by whether you’re meeting your own standards.
You think you’re a failure. This is a common one, but a lot of the time the “it” isn’t well-defined – and it leads to treating partial successes as complete failures. If your resolution was to declutter your whole house, and you only got through the entryway before you gave up in frustration, you’re not a failure. You’re a person who successfully decluttered an entryway. Rather than seeing yourself as a failure, set a new process-based goal and give it another shot.
You think you lack the willpower. Weight loss is a goal where this comes up all the time. You’d love to lose weight, but no matter how hard you try to eat salad and cut out chocolate and all that other “healthy” stuff, you just can’t seem to do it. This is similar to the first goal because you’re trying to tackle a huge goal (“lose 50 pounds”), when you might be successful if you took it a little bit at a time. A smaller goal – eating salad a few times per week, or cooking a complete “healthy” meal one day a week” – might be completely do-able. Enough small wins turn into big progress.
You’re worried about what others will think. We’ve all been there. If you’re trying to make a change, and the people around you aren’t supportive, it can be tough. But ultimately, this is the exact opposite of “it’s not really your goal”. You’re typically not chasing your goal for the benefit of others. You’re doing it for your own benefit. If you succeed, it’s your success – not theirs. And if you fail, they’re not going to shoulder the blame. If it’s important to you, then chase after it. To quote the old saying, “the people who matter won’t mind, and the people that mind don’t matter.”
We know, you’ve heard all of this before. It’s pretty much motivational psychology 101. But despite the fact that we’ve all heard this dozens of times, we all need reminders from time to time.
So let this be your reminder. To quote Zig Ziglar, “failure is an event, not a person”. Don’t stress about what did or didn’t happen in January. Take the opportunity now to step back, analyze what happened, and figure out how to be successful.
If you’re like most people and you have a junk-related goal, stay tuned to this blog for tips and motivation throughout the year. And when you run into things like huge, heavy couches and garages full of old boxes that you can’t move, one call to us will help you turn a potential failure into a huge win!