2015 is set to be the year we change ourselves. We make ourselves better. Lose that 10 kilos we packed on over the Christmas break. This year is the year we’re going to stick to our New Year Resolutions.
As the last specks of 2014 faded into the exuberant colour of Sydney’s New Year’s Eve celebrations many of us may have found ourselves scrawling promises on scraps of paper, hastily bashing notes into our phones or making mental lists of things that we had planned to do last year and resolve to not do in the New Year.
Now this may be a tradition that a lot of us have come to see as the month long (sometimes too long) change. It is characterised by visits to overcrowded gyms, bizarre organic diets and promises to the liver to never drink again.
Of course, this is where most trip up in the jungle of self-improvement. It is outstandingly easy to imagine a flawless surmounting of our most extreme vices and misgivings. It is easier still to conspire with our inner sloth and trick our minds into accepting that an effort was made and that our bags are packed and ready for 2016.
If we are serious about completing the resolutions we have made ourselves, then in making them we must also be serious. There is no point in deciding to “lose 2 kgs a month” if a plan is not put in place to do so. How are you going to go about losing this weight? What is a manageable schedule you can stick to so that it is ensured you achieve your goal?
If we actively plan and organise time to work at and accomplish our goals then they may be achieved. Don’t try and do everything at once; chunk your activities into practical parts. Go for a run every Tuesday afternoon, avoid sugary snacks on a Sunday night and remember that with these smaller steps bigger ones will follow.
Refrain from dancing with the extremes. It will help no one if you run for hours on end, find yourself riddled with cramps and stitches and needing to catch the bus home. Run for a length of time that borders comfort and strain and work towards building upon your successes. Maybe that means running down the road to stand in the air-conditioned nirvana of the local grocery store. Maybe it means only drinking on only one night a week. Soon enough you’ll be able to run to the grocery store and back and even forget the last time you drank when you were out (for the right reasons).
With all of these small ‘good routines’ building and all of your plans being chunked you may even forget what you had resolved to do. You may even unfold that bit of paper you’d scrawled onto, search up that note you’d written or wrack your brain to remember what you were trying to change.
Only to realise that you have become that version of yourself without even taking that tactical 11 month break.
So now it’s time to go and achieve your new year resolutions and goals. There’s no use staring at these words. What do you want to improve? How can you best go about doing it?
Make sure that in 2016 you’re maintaining what you started this year and not continuing the cycle you started years ago when you first though it was a good idea to resolve to “be fit”, but never quite around to doing anything about it.
2015 is the year you should resolve to do things and go and do them!
