Today on the blog we have a life coach, Mariana who talks about a very apt topic especially in the month of February, where one usually starts to forget (or slip back on) their new year resolutions/goals or habits for the year. This obviously brings up feeling of disappointment and one tends to feel demotivated. In this article she talks about her 7 tried and tested steps to keep on track.
We start off each year excited about various possibilities. The feeling of a fresh start is always exciting, it allows you to move towards a life you truly want. And with this thought, we set ourselves up with how we want our lives to look like and we start to dream.
Maybe we want to find someone special, maybe we want a new job, maybe we want to work out every day instead of once per week or maybe this is the year when we will stop smoking. The dreams for a perfect life are endless.
Setting new year resolutions is like dreaming about this perfect life. Dreaming about how everything will be different and how everything will be perfect. But, in this process, we often forget to look at the reality of moving towards our goals.
First of all, let me tell you, you can dream of a perfect life, of a fulfilling life, of a life that fills you up every single day and you CAN get there. The thing is, you are on point A and to get to point B, there is a journey to be taken, there are steps to be taken.
“You will celebrate so many accomplishments and feel so excited and fulfilled but there will also be days when you are overwhelmed and even feel stuck and let me tell you, that is completely normal.”
Being uncomfortable is a good sign, it signifies you stepping up and moving towards your dreams. In this article I share with you the steps that help you follow through with your new year resolutions not just in January but throughout the year and to start creating a life you dream about!
Review your past year
Reviewing your year is one of the most impactful exercises one do. If you have done it then it’s worth a quick review and if not, I would encourage you to look back again or for the first time and truly see how your year went.
To review your year, ask yourself:
- What went well?
- What did I struggle with?
- What goals had I set and what did I achieve?
- What would your past self from 5 years ago be in awe of from what you did last year?
If you are struggling to see something to feel proud of, know this, it doesn’t need to be something enormous, just something that felt right, something that your past self never thought you would achieve.
Review your new year resolutions
First of all, right before you go back to reviewing your new year resolutions, ask yourself, based on the review of your year:
- What do you want more of?
- What do you want less of?
- What do you want to keep doing?
Now, go back to your new year’s resolutions. Are they aligned with how you truly want your life to look like?
Be aware of resistance
As you probably have noticed by now, life likes to throw surprises and challenges at us (sometimes at the weirdest times!) and the more we are ready for it, the more we can adapt and move forward.
Let’s say you want to work out more often and the end goal is to work out 5 times per week. And, one day, you wake up and you don’t feel like working out because you either feel sick or cuz something happened or cuz your kid got sick or you simply don’t feel like it. And you end up not going.
What happens now?
One could throw this habit away and just go back to telling themselves that “you just can’t create a habit, or that things never work for you
OR
You can look at what happened with curiosity in trying to understand what happened, how did you feel about it, what could you have done differently? So you would have two choices, one to judge yourself or one where you are trying to understand what happened and getting back to what you’re trying to inculcate the next day.
The thing is, many a times we don’t look at the resistance that comes with starting a new habit but, as soon as we feel it, we take it as a sign of not being able to do it, that we’re not really cut out for it.
But, in reality, it is important to know that this happens to everyone and we are all human.
Yep!… Every time we start a new habit, every time we take action towards a goal, especially when leaving our comfort zone, our mind will give us reasons why we don’t need to follow through with it, why we don’t want to do it anymore because it is trying to protect us. Our mind is always trying to protect us from our perceptions about failure and disappointment.
So what can you do? Be conscious of the fact that this will happen and that you can move ahead despite that.
Be patient and compassionate with yourself
One thing that can get in the way of our habits is our impatience. Whenever we start moving towards a goal and we take a few steps, we start to get impatient and expect quick results.
What is the first step you will take to get there?
Every single week, look at your goals. Now, look at your week and think, how can I move towards my goals this week?
What is the simplest step I can take daily to move towards my goals?
Write this down and make sure you only have 3 priorities per day scheduled otherwise it goes from feeling motivating and exciting to overwhelming and daunting.
Taking between one to three small steps per day might not seem that much, specially if you want results straight away but the more you take sustainable actions, the closer you are towards attaining your goals and you’ve got to love the journey that you take as you inch towards them.
Make sure you enjoy the journey
- Setting goals can feel like so much fun!
- Envisioning the life we want to have can be so much fun!
But sometimes we forget that reaching our goals is just 10% of your life and that actually, 90% of our life is the journey towards our goals.
So make sure you love that journey.
If you start feeling like it isn’t serving you, if you start feeling like this is not the life you want for yourself and that, that goal is actually not the right goal for you, you can always review it, you can always change it.
Remember this is your life and you can be in control.
You will :
- fail along the way
- have amazing wins along the way AND
- get to know yourself so much better every step of the way.
Reviewing your week
While you are taking the steps to move towards your goals, remember, to reflect on how you are feeling. To do this, I really recommend asking yourself at the end of every single week:
- From 0 to 10, how did my week go?
- How did I feel during this week?
What am I celebrating?
Hope the steps above will help you re-evaluate your current situation and bring you back on track to the life you really want to build this year!
Good luck!
My name is Mariana, I am a life coach and I help women unplug and detach from feeling busy to creating their perfect life while moving towards their goals.
I have been through several stages in my own life that sparked my passion to support other women to create a life we can love.
You can get in touch with her by connecting with her on Instagram.
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To read posts from January, click here
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