New Year’s Resolutions: Make a Plan not a Promise

Re-Posted with permission:

Peter J. Weiss, Wellness Evangelist, is an internal medicine physician and former health plan CEO. He is author of More Health Less Care and can be reached at More Health, Less Care: Building America’s Wellness System.

I hope you had a Merry Christmas and we’re looking at New Year’s Eve coming up. It’s the middle of the holiday season, and I want you to have a happy new year. I’d like to talk to you about New Year’s resolutions today because hopefully you haven’t made any yet.

So many New Year’s resolutions fail. People say, “I’m going to do this. I’m going to lose twenty pounds. I’m going to eat differently. I’m going to start working out. I’m going to go to the gym. I’m going to do this, that or the other thing.”

They embark on this “new thing” on January first and by Valentine’s Day it’s all over. They haven’t made it and then they beat themselves up emotionally and say, “I’ve got low willpower. I’m a weak person. I can’t do it.” And that just makes it harder to change.

I don’t want you to repeat that cycle. I don’t want you to go through this cycle of making a promise to yourself that you can’t deliver on, not delivering on it, and then beating yourself up which makes it that much harder to change in the future. I’d like to see you change for the better.

There are two problems with most resolutions:

1) They don’t represent a commitment to most people

2) Most people don’t have a good enough plan to make it happen

Often a resolution is like a casual promise that “I’m going to do it,” but there’s not a lot of depth behind the promise. People haven’t put the same kind of commitment to it that they would put into other major decisions in life.

In my book, More Health Less Care, I talk about thinking about this like enlisting in the military, getting married or buying a house. Those are huge commitments. You can’t get out of them easily. You’re going forward, and there are consequences to commitments like those. So that’s the way I’d like you to think about your New Year’s resolution.

If you’re going to make one, make it at a serious level. This is going to require a lot of thought, a lot of reflection, maybe even meditation and prayer, and you might not even want to make it on New Year’s. You might want to wait a little bit to make sure you’re really ready to make the commitment.

And as you’re thinking about this, you can begin to think about, “What concrete steps am I actually going to take to build this into my life in such a way that it is going to work? That it’s not going to fail the way things have failed for me before?”

Then you can begin to build a plan, a plan to make it work and a plan to adjust if it’s not quite working the way you want as opposed to just quitting.

When you have a plan and a commitment, then you’re ready to move ahead. But until then, don’t make a resolution because it’s really not that helpful and could be harmful as we’ve talked about.

When you’re ready…go for it. You can do it.

Article and credits:
http://www.drpeterjweiss.com/2010/12/new-years-resolutions-make-a-plan-not-a-promise.html#

ZDT Author’s comments:
Excellent article, and to the point. Again, why even make a New Year’s resolution (decision) if there is no commitment to carry it out?