So we wave goodbye to 2015 and welcome in 2016. The goose was well and truly cooked. After the excess of Christmas and New Year we all default back to the tried and trusted routine of making the habitual New Year’s resolution. New career, new look and new habits. All of the following are ushered in at the rate of knots in January and by mid-year we are wondering what happened to the goals of the year. Our dreams and ideals give way to our tendencies of wanting to indulge. You can’t eat in the fancy restaurant every night and then expect to have the perfect figure. You can’t spend the pay cheque when you haven’t been paid yet. Everyone wants to throw themselves in to the fantasy of living a better life, yet not everybody wants to cut out the effects of trying to live the high life
Starting out with the best intentions is just not enough to get you what you want. In 2015 I couldn’t but help notice a lot of my motivation to better myself was based around greed, selfishness and desire to want attain materialistic things. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t alone in thinking like this. When I look back at the start of 2015 and analyse some of the goals I set myself and why they failed I realised I was just repeating the same cycle as the year before. Literally on Jan 1st I re-entered myself back into the rat race and the great paper chase, dancing to the same tune. At some point you have to align yourself properly so that you have the best chance possible to succeed.
It’s a fairly common observation that come January most Gyms are bulging at the seams, trying to get a locker is a bit of an ordeal. As sure as day follows night come the end of February the natural order has been restored. The same faces can be seen at the same time on the same days. All those people who started out with great intentions, and who purchased a very expensive twelve month contract are now scratching their heads trying to figure out where it all went wrong. How do we get around the problem of repeating the same mistakes?
The term “Fresh Start Effect” has been coined by researchers. It was an experiment carried out that showed statistically most new resolutions are likely to fail. The idea of a fresh start gives the illusion of consigning last year’s failure to the past. This gives us the chance to leave our old ways in the past and create new habits. Rather than just giving up we create new transition points. So if we fail we don’t just abandon our goal we make a shift in when we think it’s achievable. It’s this perception of a new beginning that will give you a boost when your motivation is waning. However you have to be mindful that at some point that you can’t keep rewarding yourself with a fresh start. Check out with link for more on the Fresh-Start effect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDBiSrhjbns
While there is lots of reasons that people don’t succeed, and many of them are probably perfectly valid ones, the real reason you don’t succeed is always down to you. Somewhere inside you there is a block to getting you to your goal. So before you create any fresh start you need to figure out what this block is, because until you do that you will still be living out the illusion of creating yourself a new reality while in truth you are only one step away from starting all over again next January. When I spoke of aligning yourself properly I was referring to the fact that whatever way you challenge yourself you have to make sure that your mind, body and, heart are all pulling in the same direction. Once you make this small shift you will be surprised by how much you can actually achieve.