New Year, New Goals

It is officially 2011!  The start of a new year comes with new goals and a desire for excellence in the 365 days to come.  As our culture has established, we all tend to set goals.  Some of my personal ones are to graduate high school, gain my Catagory 2 upgrade on the road, and race and train to my fullest potential with the NOW-MS Society Elite Woman's team.


Here is some of what I have been thinking about these past few days.


Sticking to these goals are not life altering and spur of the moment decisions, as seems to fit the persona of a vast amount of "New Year's Resolutions".  And since most of these resolutions are not well thought out and/or not sought after with complete dedication, they tend to fail.  It is a sad, yet accuate, truth.  Only those who have a good amount of self-discipline can stick to a major change for a resolution. 


My philosophy on how to make a resolution stick is to go with something minor.  If someone ate fast food every day and hardly excercised, instead of saying "I can not eat anymore fast food, and I'm going to go to the gym three times a week" change to "I can only have fast food 1-3 times a week, and Im going to walk my dog for 30 minutes 2 times a week."  This type of resolution is more likely to suceed, therefore getting you closer to your real goal of better health.  In the first example, the person cut them off from their bad habbit "cold Turkey"; very few individuals can actually pull this off for the long term.  What typically happens when you do this is you will succeed for a minimal amount of time, but then you will start to feel deprived of the item, or habbit, and sneek back to it and eventually end up worse than how you started.  Taking the transition slowly will increase chances of longterm success.


Another way to have a goal come to reality is to set up a plan for it.  Instead of only having a vague goal, create steps that will lead you to success.


These are just some of the thoughts that I have been having these last few days.   I had noticed the tendency for the "New Years Resolutions" to fail after the two week to one month period of time.  I don't think you have to let your goals not come to reality, and keeping them realistic and creating steps will help you achieve them.


Please let me know any experiences that you have had with previous goals and current ones.  How you made them succeed or why they didn't.