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Happy New Year!
One of the best things about New Year's Day is the opportunity to hit the reset button. The holiday festivities have come to a close, the friends and relatives have gone home, and the decorations are going back in the box.
For many, New Year's Day is a time of quiet reflection, taking stock of the past year, then leveling up for the year ahead with some nice, juicy resolutions. Follow these New Year's Resolutions tips to help you stay on track for all of 2018:
- Get quiet and reflect on the reasons behind your goals. When you have a tangible reason for accomplishing a goal, it's easier to attain it.
- Stay positive. You've got this! You've got this because, in the next step, you'll create actionable goals that deliver real results!
- Create small, actionable steps for each goal. Goals that feel attainable become attainable. Make a list of baby steps — things you can do each day toward your goal.
- Create a reasonable timeline that makes sense to you. Everyone has a different pace that they work at, metabolize food at, run at, etc. Be honest with yourself about how long it will take to accomplish your goal.
- Consider hiring an expert. Coaches, mentors, and trainers all have one thing in common: helping you get to the desired result you said you wanted. Coaches keep you accountable and they're also well-versed in what's reasonable and what isn't, based on years of hands-on experience. Think about it – you only have your own past results to measure progress. A professional coach usually has several case studies to refer to while creating your customized plan.
- Be careful what you think and say in relation to your goal. We do as we believe, think and then say, so try to choose thoughts and words that support your cause. "I'll never lose this weight," or "I'm a lost cause," is not conducive to your success. "I want to drop 10 pounds, and that's why I'm walking an extra mile per week, eating more vegetables and drinking more water." Before you know it, you will naturally seek all the tools needed to succeed because you are not in direct conflict with your own goal.
- Visualize the desired end result. Athletes have touted visualization techniques or "mental rehearsal" as a pathway to success for many years. Picturing the desired end result helps the brain gear up for success, thus revealing the steps to achieve the goal. Shape Magazine reports, "And now experts are discovering that the perks of visualization go far beyond fitness. New research has verified its effectiveness for everyone, showing that the technique is extremely powerful at improving confidence, reducing stress, and boosting performance. That's because your brain responds to visualization the same way your muscles do," says Philip Post, Ph.D., the assistant professor of motor learning and sport psychology at New Mexico State University. "Best of all, it takes just 10 minutes a day of visualization to start seeing the benefits."
Investing the time to plan for your success makes attaining your New Year's Resolutions so much easier. Before you know it, you'll be pulling out the holiday decorations, the relatives and friends will be back in town, and you'll be looking forward to hitting the reset button all over again.
Do you have any tried and true New Year's Resolutions tips? We'd love to hear them!
Happy New Year, from the Weidner Team!