The Main Reasons Many New Year’s Resolutions do Not Work!
If you made some new year's resolutions, this is the time you might be struggling to achieve your goals; the time when all the good intentions are still far from reality, and your motivation is fading fast. But you're not alone.
Every new year brings a freshness of promise, of hope, and the opportunity to change our lives to something more in tune with what we wish to be. Hence why many people make resolutions they wish to keep; resolutions around losing weight, giving up smoking, getting that new job, giving up that old one, or even breaking off that unfulfilling relationship and being more independent, for example. The start of a new year tends to galvanise us into action to change ourselves and our situation in some way.
However, a few days or weeks into the year, and most people will find it really difficult to keep to the promises they made themselves earlier on. It is not because they have changed their minds, or they haven't got the genuine intention to succeed in achieving their desires. Not at all. Something else they haven't even thought of would be blocking their success and preventing them from reaching their goal. In a nutshell, they are concentrating on changing their behaviour, instead of their values or mindset, and it just won't work.
Behaviour is dictated by values, and values are formed by beliefs. Those three elements - belief, values, behaviour - work in strict tandem. It means if we wish for our behaviour to change, we have to start with our beliefs. We really cannot just change our behaviour and do nothing else. We have to change those beliefs we have about the issue, which then affects our values, and ultimately changes our behaviour.
The same with smoking or weight loss. If you wish to give up smoking, it really matters WHY you are giving it up for you to achieve your goal.
For example, if I really wish to make my health better and lessen the effect of diabetes on my body, I cannot see anything too sweet, like chocolate, as harmless food. I have to view it as something deadly and dangerous to my existence. Once I treat chocolate like virtual poison (changing my beliefs) I will then have a value that says chocolate is not something I eat, which then stops me from buying it and having it. In that way, I would keep my resolution to improve the state of my illness because both my belief and behaviour are in alignment.
The same with smoking or weight loss. If you wish to give up smoking, it really matters WHY you are giving it up for you to achieve your goal. If it is to save money, to stop having to deal with the smell of it, or because you will be 'better' for it, you won't succeed in your effort, because those are not really important, survival reasons that the body will recognise. Those are social reasons which we tend to treat with lower priority. The good thoughts around cigarettes and why you smoke them in the first place will still be hovering in your subconscious. They will override the other thoughts you have of giving up.
Until you can start imagining the BAD effects of smoking; visualising it in a very negative way so that it is stripped of all its attraction, and your BELIEFS around cigarettes change to match its dangers, you will merely go through the motions for a few weeks, craving it badly, then going back to it later in time. Until you change your beliefs and values around cigarettes, switching from accepting them, per se, to rejecting them as potential danger to both your lifestyle and survival, any stoppage will merely be temporary.
•• Author: The Essential Guide to Confidence (ebook and print)
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