George
10, 9, 8, 7 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1! Happy New Year! Oh yes, the all too familiar sound of the clock striking twelve on January 1st. Some people are drinking, celebrating and enjoying the merriments, others are eating grapes under a table for luck in love, and then there is me asleep in bed already. Just like any other night, because it is any other night.
I've never really understood the fascination with New Year. It is just a digit on a calendar date changing, what's the big deal? We don't have new month celebrations, and a digit changes then. I appreciate that every day is a gift, but there is no general celebration for it. So why is there for the new year? The earth has successfully revoked around the sun two thousand and twenty four times at this point, so I don't think it is an achievement worth celebrating. However, I do love the family gatherings, time off work and the merriment that New Year brings to people; so we can't call me a Grinch just year. New Year's resolutions, however, are a different story.
Whenever it's the new year people make sweeping declarations that this is going to be their year. This is often accompanied by the same goals they had last year, like losing weight, quitting a minimum-wage job or finally having the guts to ski dive. The number of people that actual complete these goals I think is incredibly low; although I'm no expert on the completion rates of New Year goals. Most people are aware of this too but still tell themselves the same lie year after year. I always wonder, why do this to yourself? Would it not be better to set a goal that is actually achievable? A goal you could accomplish and feel prideful in doing so? I'm not here to tell you not to make New Year's resolutions, just to encourage you to modify them a bit so you can actually get out of the cycle of lies and false hope and achieve them Let's look at some popular ones to start.
People will often say they want to lose weight or get healthy and that is their resolution. It doesn't surprise me that this fails as there isn't a clear goal. If you want to lose weight, how much weight are we talking? If you want to get healthy how are you defining healthy, running a marathon or going to the gym once a week? Once you have the definition of this goal, you can then progress with it. So say you decided for the weight loss goal you wanted to lose a stone in the next year the next part is how are you going to achieve this? And guess what for the get healthy resolution it's the same question, let's say you will feel healthy if you go to the gym five times a week. Of course, you can't lose a stone overnight or start going to the gym five times a week straight away you need to build up to it. With fourteen pounds in a stone, you nearly need to lose a pound every month. So for this one, the goal within the resolution is to lose a pound a month. You can then make the appropriate lifestyle changes to achieve this. For getting healthy and gyming five times a week your goal can be broken up a bit differently. For example, you may just join a gym in January, start once a week in February and slowly build on the commitment days over the months of the year so you are up to five days in December. See how easy New Year's resolutions are to achieve when we actually set clear goals and small steps to achieve them?
I hope this article inspires you this year to set a New Year's resolution that is achievable and well-defined. Ideally, you can break it down into small steps like the above so that you know you are achieving throughout the year. Then you can finally break out of that vicious cycle of making yourself a false promise that you will never achieve, before repeating it again the following year. Let's start achieving our goals and going places this year! And one more thing, Happy New Year!
