Hang on, February New Year Resolutions? That’s not right, January is the time for those, right?
Fair enough, so let’s take a look then, at how they’ve worked out for you so far…
Here are some questions about those January New Year Resolutions –
Did you even set them in the first place, or did you expect this year to be different from last year by magic?
Did you actually take any action after you’d set them, or did you think that setting them was enough and then the new year resolution fairies would take care of it for you?
If you took action, how long did you keep it up for? Was it a couple of weeks? One week? A couple of days? One day?
In other words, did they fail? Again.
Now, I should point out right here, that I fully accept that some people set resolutions at the beginning of the year, and by the beginning of February, they have a month’s worth of solid action behind them and are well on the way.
That’s great! If that’s you, then great! Obviously I’m a believer in the transformational power of goal achievement ideas and techniques, so yes, I do understand that not everybody ‘fails’ with New Year resolutions.
Lots of people do though…
The main reason for this, is the mindset. The resolutions are set in a jokey way. The hoped for result might be a real hope, but the idea of the resolution is that it’s something that we do every year during the period of Christmas indulgence, knowing full well that we’ll fail and then have a laugh about it.
“Ha ha, I’ve not kept to my resolution again, ha ha!”
Hmm.
Although this gives us a laugh, and the comfort of knowing that others are having a laugh about it too, it’s a false sense of comfort, for 2 reasons.
Firstly, it might feel comfortable in the short term, but in the long term, when we’re alone with our thoughts, it’s not comfortable. Not at all. When we’ve stopped laughing on social media about it, when we’ve stopped laughing with our friends about it, we know ourselves that we’ve resigned ourselves to nothing changing.
Worse than that, because it’s something done at the staging post of a start of a year, we’re resigning ourself to nothing changing for the whole year! We know we’ve done a disservice to ourselves.
The second reason that it’s a false sense of comfort to be shared with our friends, is that when *they* are on their own, when the joking has stopped, they’re feeling the same as you! That communal feel good feeling can mask the fact that it’s a group of individuals who all go back into their own private worlds, and that feelgood feeling can very quickly turn into a ‘feelnotgood‘ feeling.
Can you see how this is a mindset issue as I described it earlier?
Writing off change for a whole year? Writing off the whole concept of goal setting as something to consider at all?
Ooh, no, no, and I’m going to say it again, no.
I understand how people fall into this routine. If their peer group all does it, and the group has done it for a long time, it might feel as though it’s just the ‘way it is’, and more than that, that to think, let alone *say* otherwise might feel like rocking the boat of that peer group.
If you decide to actually take on the idea of goal setting, and then follow it up with action, it’s almost inevitable that some people around you will look at you with a quizzical ‘what are you doing?‘ expression.
That’s because it’s a challenge to their mindset just as much as it is to yours.
This is ok.
It’s normal.
It’s what happens when change is instigated, because not everyone likes change.
If that’s the case, there are 2 ways forwards.
One choice is to settle back into this idea that New Year Resolutions are just a jokey thing we do at Christmas, that they aren’t supposed to actually mean anything. We can settle back into getting the exact same results as last year, waiting until next January when we can do the whole thing again.
Or…
We can choose the other way. That’s to accept that while we set our resolutions in the jokey way, and only got the jokey results that came with it, now that January is out of the way we can decide to make February different. We can decide to set some goals with real intention, that sit with the real us, the genuine authentic us, with our joys, our passions, out real ‘wants’.
Then we can look at some goal achievement techniques that really work, and start to steer the year in the direction we want, rather than letting the year happen *to* us.
I know which way I prefer the look of!
So, look to the resolutions you set, or if you set them at all. How has it panned out for you over the month? If it went well, then great, keep it up, but if it fizzled out or never even got going in the first place, why not choose a different way. Why not see what happens if you set yourself some February New Year Resolutions?
Ok, do let me know what you think, leave a comment below!
‘Til Next Time,
Health & happiness,
Gordon
P.S. If you’d like to do something about February Resolutions, do take a look at my coaching programme ‘Transform Your Life Now.’ See what you can get done in one month!
