Have you ever failed to accomplish your new year’s resolution? Most of the others fail every year.
It’s 1st January again and I am waking up to a foggy post-apocalyptic morning with the smell of discharged blasting powder and pyro-paper frozen to the ground.
I wish I woke up on the mountain peak in the sleeping bag under the clear sky and fresh mountain air.
I wish my new year’s resolutions would be meaningful and deep. I wish I never broke them…
Hmm, what were my new years’ resolutions actually?
I remember that I’ve drunk from 8 pm with my friends then exactly at 23:59 I realized I need to do a new year’s resolution. As when the star is falling. Just make your resolution quickly…
If I can’t remember it the next day, how high is the chance of it ever coming true?
You guessed it. ZERO.
Unfortunately, this is how most of the others do it.
If you are a bit like me, I have good news:
You don’t need to wait next year to correct your resolution.
Who said that New Years Day is the only day in the year for the big change?
Big changes are happening every single day. Those changes, however, are usually done with a bit more planning than the new year’s resolutions.
Start over today.
Sit down, take a coffee and review the last year.
What were your biggest achievements? What were your biggest failures? How have you created those achievements and those failures? Take a note.
When did you feel joyful? When did you feel down? How have you created these feelings? Take note too.
Imagine that the new year is your opportunity to have more and bigger achievements than in the previous one. The only way to turn this imagination into reality is to learn from your failures.
“Failing is the key to success, but only when you don’t repeat the same failure twice.”
The second part of this sentence is critical. If you don’t learn from your mistakes you can’t grow.
I worked as a crane engineer back in the times. I was 19 years old kid thrown into the sea of information to learn how to swim. When I’ve failed to check out my task first time, my boss pointed that out and tell me how to do it better next time. Later, I’ve failed second time at the same task. Then he went nuts! I’ve tried to justify my failure, but even when it made perfect sense to me, it made no sense to him. He was disappointed. I felt insulted.
When I think about it now, my boss was right. Don’t repeat the same failure twice.
Learning from my training failures
I’ve failed a lot last year. I’ve failed way more than a year ago because I’ve challenged myself more.
I overplanned my training programs, did them for a while, then changed my mind and planned different ones.
These words “I’ve changed my mind” are messing with my success from my childhood. They sound so natural, yet they are crooked. I wish I never learned them.
These words are words of failure. “I’ve failed to achieve what I said, so I changed my mind after”. Those words are infective. If you change your mind once, you will change it again.
To prevent this from happening, you must set achievable crystal clear goals.
Study yourself!
There is no simple rule which works for everybody. Therefore, you need to put yourself at A/B testing.
For example:
During the last year, I had a problem to connect a strict training schedule with the feeling of freedom.
Freedom is my core value. If I don’t feel free I don’t feel joy. I can suppress it for a short time, but I don’t want to live as a soldier. I want to have the ability to switch sports whenever I want, to have fun. However, I want to be strong and make progress in those sports too.
A strict training schedule is on the other hand necessary for achieving what I want.
I am usually over-motivated for short term in one activity, but then it usually fades out. That’s why I want to have an option to switch.
Now you can understand that setting a plan to do callisthenics 5 times a week for an infinite time would probably end up in another change of my mind. Because I am also mountainbiker, skier and climber, committing to such training will end up in the drained body and lack of energy.
To put this together in order to work, I need to set short term goals which are crystal clear and achievable.
Instead of setting callisthenics for an infinite amount of time I can say: “I will do a 2-week callisthenics challenge, following THENX C&W program week 1&2. During that time, I can climb, ski, bike how much I want however It cannot affect 2 week challenge accomplishment. I will start tomorrow.
This is a crystal clear achievable goal. Can I do it? You bet!
Trick your mind
When I finish this 2 weeks program I will review it and decide on a new challenge, but let’s focus on my goal now.
Thanks to confidence boost from accomplishing one thing, you have the motivation to start another one.
This is how to go from success to success, instead of from the failure to failure.
Conclusion
Don’t wait. Start now. Do it properly.
The year 2020 gives you the feeling, that you can start fresh. Use it to your advantage. Review the last year than create a better new one.
Don’t be sorry about missing the New Year Resolution deadline. The majority of people who nailed the deadline don’t remember the resolution anyway.
