Picture this: me, as a young girl, I’m sitting down to make a list.\u00a0 No, I’m not an organized child – it’s New Year’s and I’m writing my resolutions for the coming year.\u00a0 Fortunately, I was not encouraged to make a huge list, though often had around a dozen items.\u00a0 I had big dreams for all the things that I could change in that year.\u00a0 If only making the list made it happen.\u00a0 We all have faced the reality – it’s not that simple.<\/p>\n
Creating new habits \u2013 changing our behavior \u2013 is difficult.\u00a0 We\u2019re creatures of habit, and cannot decide on a \u201ccomplete overhaul\u201d and expect that we\u2019ll pull it off.\u00a0 We need to train ourselves.\u00a0 That means that we need to start simply \u2013 with a very limited number of things.\u00a0 I\u2019d even say that maybe even only one thing at a time.\u00a0 You can work on multiple things; though try to make it for different times during the day.\u00a0 If you want to try changing three things \u2013 choose things that are done throughout the day \u2013 one thing for the morning, one thing for the afternoon, and one thing for the evening.<\/p>\n
Like any skill you want to have, you need to practice.\u00a0 You cannot learn to play an instrument overnight; you need to start with something relatively simple and then practice.\u00a0 And practice and continue to practice.\u00a0 Then you can move on to the next step in the process – and then practice some more.\u00a0 Eventually you’ll have the skills.\u00a0 It takes time and work to cement those skills for yourself.<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t become a nagging parent to yourself to practice whatever you’ve decided to work on.\u00a0 Hopefully you’re setting goals that you’re passionate about, and therefore want to succeed with.\u00a0 Yet, you’ll need to figure out when it makes sense to practice them.\u00a0 Put them into your schedule.\u00a0 It’s quite a phenomenon that when we put something into our schedule that we want to do, we more often actually do it.<\/p>\n
If you’ve decided to make time to exercise, look at the next week (or two weeks or month) and decide when you’ll do it.\u00a0 The frequency is up to you, maybe you want to start slowly, and two days a week is all you can manage.\u00a0 If you have a schedule that allows you to block the same time on the same days, it makes it easier.\u00a0 If you have a more erratic schedule, just make sure you put time into the schedule.\u00a0 Don’t “play it by ear” waiting for the time to appear for your exercise, doing that just makes it more likely this goal will fall by the wayside.<\/p>\n
Ideally, you’ll want to make time to review how you’re coming on your goals.\u00a0 If you’ve faltered along the way, you can consider what went wrong, make some adjustments, and begin again.\u00a0 On the other hand, if you’ve made good progress, you can think about whether you want to add some new goals.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s remarkably easy to dream big \u2013 you\u2019re determined that you want to do this and that, ad infinitum.\u00a0 We want to stay on top of those regular tasks and have time to also do much more.\u00a0 At this time of year specifically, it’s traditional to evaluate the things we want to change and make resolutions for the transformative powers of the New Year.<\/p>\n
When you examine your goals and priorities, don’t overwhelm yourself by a long list \u2013 whether you think about it once a year or many times.\u00a0 If you want to succeed, limit the goals to a small number.\u00a0 Then the challenge is \u2013 you need to put concrete steps into your schedule.\u00a0 You need to plan specifically what you are going to do.\u00a0 This applies to everything you decide to work on, at any time of year.\u00a0 \u263a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As the traditional time for setting resolutions for the New Year, make sure to keep your list short and most importantly, put concrete, specific steps into your schedule. Ideally, you’ll want to review your progress periodically throughout the year and make any adjustments that you need to reach your goals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[10,8,18,9],"class_list":["post-271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-holidayhelp","tag-behavior","tag-discipline","tag-goals","tag-motivation"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7p82c-4n","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jenniferlinnig.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jenniferlinnig.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jenniferlinnig.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jenniferlinnig.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jenniferlinnig.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.jenniferlinnig.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":274,"href":"http:\/\/www.jenniferlinnig.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions\/274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jenniferlinnig.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jenniferlinnig.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jenniferlinnig.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}