How To Stick With Your New Year Resolutions In 2017

 

Did you make any New Year Resolutions this year? Lose weight, stop smoking, get a promotion or start your own business? Whatever your NY resolution is, you may now be feeling the pressure to start or stick with it…

You have tidied the house and all the Xmas decorations have been put away, but its end of January and you have not started using the gym membership or working through the things on your list. With February and March looming, you may feel like you’re struggling to keep up with the resolutions list, and it feels scary how far behind you are.

So did you make the right NY Resolution? If you made a life-changing resolution, a big plan to change direction or do something huge, it may be that the reason you’re now starting to panic is that you’ve taken too much on.

Setting small achievable goals, instead of a big goal that will overwhelm and frustrate you, can help you succeed in your personal life and business life. You also need to ensure that you have addressed those issues that could result in failure. For example, if you’ve tried to lose weight before, what went wrong and how can you improve your chances of success this time?

Often it comes down to confidence and self-belief. If these are already low it can be an uphill struggle to stick with and achieve your resolutions. Low self-confidence can sabotage your chances of success.

If this is an issue for you, consider addressing this first – hypnotherapy for confidence can help – and then with a boost to your self-belief you’ll be in much better shape to achieve those NY resolutions.

Tips For Sticking To Your New Year Resolutions

By taking small actionable steps and prioritising what is important to you, you will be more likely to stick with and succeed in your resolutions.

Here are some key points to remember to help you stick with your New Year resolutions:

  1. Setting out SMART goals Specific, Measurable Achievable Realistic and Timely goals, in the beginning, will set you up to understand what you are trying to achieve this year.
  2. If your goal is to getting on top of your finances, concentrate your motivation and energy on the most important aspect of the debt you have accumulated. In this manner, you will pay off a little of the money you owe at a time and have a strong sense of progress. This will motivate you to continue to keep playing and looking after your finances in a positive manner.
  3. Use whatever resources you have to help, for example – put your gym clothes ready when you wake up so you can immediately get some exercise before you start to make excuses about your exercise regime. Stay away from risky situations if you want to get fit and healthy don't go to McDonald's or go near fast foods or junk food. Put reminders in places where you are triggered to follow your healthy choices or behaviours like notes on the fridge, or on the bathroom mirror.
  4. Get organised! Don’t allow other tasks to stop you from achieving your goals – where possible automate them so they don’t distract you. Set out reminders to tasks that you have to do every few weeks time and look to see how you can prioritise some of them. Set out the actions you are going to take to achieve your next goal to keep going.
  5. Be flexible. If you have an all or nothing approach and fail at one of your steps it’s likely you will become disillusioned and not succeed in your overall goal. Instead, give yourself a break if you don’t meet every target, be flexible and realign your steps so you can move forward.
  6. Set yourself a reasonable time limit and if you are unable to keep up with it revisit your goal list and make changes so you can achieve the goals in small chunks.
  7. Don't give up and keep trying. Create a balanced approach with baby steps that you can act on. Keep yourself motivated by being mindful of what you want and knowing the results you expect that will help you keep going.
  8. Get the support you need, having someone to talk to you will get a different point of view of how you are going to succeed with your goals. This will also help make you accountable and you might get different ideas in order to get results or solutions you desire. Asking and accepting help will strengthen your resolve and manage your anxiety and stress. Also seeking help from a coach or a mentor can help change unhealthy habits and behaviours and address issues you have suffered from in the past, procrastination or emotional issues.

Old habits and behaviours can be hard to change but they are often the key to successfully achieving your goals and resolutions. Once you understand why you respond to certain challenges or pressures in a particular way, it becomes easier to change your habits and behaviours.

Sometimes it can be as simple as changing the way you approach your resolution. Instead of saying, ‘I want to lose weight’ a resolution of ‘I’m going to eat more healthily’ can increase your chances of successfully losing the weight and keeping it off long-term.

Cognitive behaviour therapy with hypnosis is a highly effective way of identifying habits and behaviours that are sabotaging your chances of success, and then replace them with better responses that increase your motivation and drive.

If you’re struggling with your New Year Resolutions and would like to talk through ways of getting back on the programme, I offer a free 30-minute phone consultation for people in West Surrey / Hampshire. Book your appointment here.

by Andrea Smith

Make Improving Your Self-Confidence Your Top New Year's Resolution!

Every year we make New Years Resolutions and every year by the end January we fail to keep up with them. For your New Years Resolutions to work you need to develop healthy habits, positive thoughts and improve your self-confidence.

Self-confidence is the key to making other NY Resolutions stick.

With great self-confidence, we will believe that we can achieve our goals whether that’s to stop smoking, lose weight, find a new job or run a marathon. Therefore before you set yourself a challenge that could easily result in a relapse, let’s look at improving your self-confidence first.

Relapsing is when your brain defaults to what you do normally – habits and behaviours - and says “oh well, never mind”. Unfortunately, setbacks like this can result in negative feelings and depression. So instead of setting ourselves up for a fall, if we address those deep rooted behaviours and habits first we can build our self-confidence and increase our chances of success.

Self-Confidence Will Help You Achieve Your NY Resolutions

Creating new behaviours and habits to substitute the old ways of thinking will help you take control of your New Years Resolutions.

If you want to explore a therapy to help you boost your self-confidence, hypnotherapy for confidence is a highly effective way to change negative habits and behaviours and thereby increase your chances of achieving all kinds of goals and resolutions.

Here are some self-reflective tips that can give your self-confidence a boost and help you understand how you can succeed with your new year's goals. Write down your answers on a piece of paper:

  1. What were your best achievements, personal successes or breakthroughs in the last year? Did you step up or into a new opportunity, try something you never tried before that make you fearful or uncomfortable?
  2. What were the challenges you had to overcome? How did you conquer the fear of failure, get up when you got knocked down, overcome the setbacks and find the strength to speak and fight even though you were scared?
  3. Where did you find your supportive network, people that influenced your methods, your motivation and how did you move forward? Where and who do you find your inspiration from and did you use this motivation to clear your space to focus on your goals?

Your brain has a way to re-inventing itself and those positive habits and behaviours you wrote down above can become the default response when you meet other challenges. Instead of relapsing into old habits and behaviours you can have the power and control!

Here are 7 steps for changing the way you think:

  1. Focus your thoughts on being positive – an important aspect of starting the new year with and finding success with your goals
  2. Make a plan and take small steps to work through each task or activity. If you try to tackle your goal as one big project you are more likely to feel stressed and relapse into old habits.
  3. Don't associate yourself with negative people on social media or elsewhere. Also, list the negative beliefs you have and refute them and set some realistic beliefs about yourself. Being too judgmental about yourself will impede your progress.
  4. Set your goals in a SMART manner – Specific Measurable Achievable Realistic Time-based. Break these down into small steps or you will find that you lose your motivation. The way to achieve success is to take one baby step at a time.
  5. Combine your SMART goals with STRETCH goals (a big dream goal) that mean you are dreaming big and going after your ULTIMATE goals. Both these together are called the WISE goals which are grounded in what steps you are going to take next to achieve success.
  6. Avoid thinking like a perfectionist. We can always do better but a healthier way of thinking is doing our best or ‘just good enough’. Focus on the positive. If we fall short of doing what we want and fail at our aspirations, it’s easy to fall into the negative spiral of thinking. So a healthier method would be to take baby steps and have a realistic / ‘good enough’ approach.
  7. Don't wait for things to happen or come to you. Learn something new each day and challenge yourself.

By focusing on actionable SMART goals and measuring them with the success you have achieved you will create a positive focus and a feedback loop. This will help motivate you to take the actionable steps week by week and create habits and behaviours long-term.

You will feel motivated, positive as you complete each step, and this will boost your confidence and self-esteem.

Understanding yourself will minimise your weaknesses and strengthen your resolve to stay focused and driven to daily enjoy your accomplishments. Finding a mentor or a therapist to help you to stay motivated, goal focused and on track can also improve your confidence and wellbeing.

An important thing to remember is to be patient with yourself, self-confidence and esteem is a step by step process and practice.

To find out more about hypnotherapy for confidence visit this page.

by Andrea Smith