How To Make And Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions, Part 1

How To Make And Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions, Part 1

by Linda-Ann Stewart

I used to make a list of New Year’s resolutions, such as: lose weight, exercise, organize my desk, eat better, etc., etc., and so forth. However, within a day I’d broken at least half of them. The rest were blown by the end of the week. Since I felt like a failure, I just stopped making them. I figured why should I put myself through the frustration?

It’s too bad, because resolutions are a positive way to improve your life and change old habit patterns. Starting a new year with the intention of establishing a healthier life helps us to wipe the slate clean, to write a better script. We begin with great hopes, only to get sucked back into the familiar rut. Why is it that so many times we fail to attain our list of resolutions?

Think about this. What if your partner brought you a long list of things they wanted you to do immediately? For example, they wanted you to move all the furniture in the house, change the landscaping, paint the house, completely redecorate within a week? You’d groan, crumble and look for the closest hole to hide in. The same is true of your subconscious mind.

Your subconscious mind processes and stores everything you’ve ever seen, done, heard, thought, or experienced. All of this information mixes together to give you the life you now have.

If you resolve to completely recondition yourself within a month, your inner mind falters. “Too much!” it screams, and then proceeds to get you so involved in life that you forget all that silly stuff. An excessive amount of change at any one time overwhelms your subconscious. However, there are some things you can do to maximize your success with New Year’s resolutions.

Copyright 2001, 2012 Linda Ann Stewart
All Rights Reserved

2 thoughts on “How To Make And Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions, Part 1

  1. So, what’s the solution? It’s to first work on giving ourselves considerable empathy—self-empathy—for all the needs that were not met in our childhood, and are not being met presently. Only you can devise functional strategies to get your needs met; it is no one else’s responsibility. How’s that for self-empowerment! Really, it’s all in you to make your life extraordinary. And in order to do that, it’s important to not only work on the six pillars of self-esteem —the practices of self-acceptance, self-assertiveness, self-responsibility, and living consciously, purposefully, and with integrity—for instance via the sentence completion method of subconscious exploration, but to also focus on how you are relating to yourself and to others, in terms of your feelings and needs. In order to get in touch with these fundamentals, it’s vital to free your mind of all the judgments, diagnoses, criticisms, blame, shame, guilt, while taking nothing in yourself and in others personally. Look at these simply as inauthentic processes from days long gone, which lead to quite costly strategies of getting your needs met.

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