How to Make and KEEP a NY's Resolution

I'll bet that by now you've Already broken your New Year's resolution to exercise everyday  and eat right. Right? "Oh, well," You're probably telling yourself, "there's always next year...by the way, are you going to finish that twinkie?" Sorry if I sound overly fatalistic, but if  I do it's because numbers don't lie. Consider this: only 8% of you who've made a New Year's resolution will realize their goal. That means that nearly every single person who makes a resolution will fail to achieve it. You might say, "Well it's not about achievement necessarily so much as it's about having direction". Understood. But if you had the ability to accomplish, or at the very least be on track to accomplishing your annual goals instead of making empty promises to yourself, wouldn't you want to? Here are a few tips that have helped me achieve my health and fitness goals. And by the way, this is applicable to any long-term goals that you may have, not necessarily your health and fitness goals.

Preparation

Preplanning is always essential. You must make provisions to win before you begin, or when challenges come your way, you'll constantly be in reaction mode rather than action mode. Reacting to events is coming at them from a position of weakness. As Sunzi says in The Art of War, "the battle should already be one before the general enters the field of battle. You have to make provisions for ambushes in the road in advance. For example, if you're a physician whose made a resolution to lose, say 20 lbs in 2011, you'll possibly have to make meal provisions for those nights and weekends when you're on-call to avoid hitting the Golden Arches. Keeping a few extra packets of Shakeology in your glove box while you're stuck in the ER should keep you on track.

Think about What the possible challenges or roadblocks to your goal could be. planning early will give you plenty of time to iron out the kinks.

Note: This article has been posted in January, well after New Year's Day, but all is not lost. Consider using the first day of spring, (March 20th) as your "New Year's Day". After all you would be starting over along with the rest of nature. Everything else in creation will be begining with you and I'd be willing to bet that we humans would fare a lot better hitting the reset button when the rest of the natural world (at least in our hemisphere) is doing the same.

Broadcast your intentions

Shining the light of day on your goals is essential. Let your friends know what you're planning to accomplish, people who will hold your feet to the fire. It's especially helpful if you have a close friend or a spouse who holds a similar dream for themselves. Can't find a partner? consider going on WOWY, the Team Beachbody online gym. There you'll find people just like you who desire to lose a few or a lot of pounds. In WOWY, not only can you schedule workouts with others and chat afterwards in the cool down room, but you can win up to $1,000 in cash and prizes just for logging in your workout. There, you and your workout buddies can keep each other accountable and you get to make potential life-long friends... don't laugh, it happens. Click here for more info on WOWY

Have a strategy

In life, you don't get what you deserve, you get what you plan. I promise you there are people less capable than you are in the area of your health and fitness who are succeeding head and shoulders above most of the population because they've discovered the importance of and the power in having a strategy to achievement along with a corresponding commitment to stick to it.

Track your progress




A practice that I learned from Tony Horton at a Team Beachbody workshop was jotting my workouts down on a calendar 1 month in advance in black ink. Each day that you accomplish your goal, X it out on your calendar in red ink. A can tell you from personal experience you'll do anything you have to in order to have every day marked red! There's something about seeing your accomplishments right there in black and white (and red) that motivates you to keep it up. It's a powerful feeling seeing that for 2 months straight, you didn't miss a single workout day!



Do a quarterly assesment just like corporate America does in order to take stock of what's working and what needs to be tweeked a little in order to maximize success. If you've been succsessful (and only you get to define what success is) then this is the time to reward yourself with an indulgence. Eat guilt-free for a weekend (that's right, a weekend). And because it's just once a quarter, don't waste it on microwave pizza and Dos Equis beer. Splurge, you will have deserved it!

Don't quit!

If you've failed by falling off the wagon, don't beat yourself up. The difference between those who accomplish there health and fitness goals and those who don't is not that the achievers never fail. It's that WHEN they fail, they keep going. It's like I tell my kids, "You're never a failure unless you quit. Now quit crying and go get daddy a beer".

~Coach Mike