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Jerry Clark

Are My New Year's Resolutions Resolute?


Oh, the trap of starting New Year's resolutions. It can be a setup for failure. They once were more popular. I can recall the time they were truly important and exciting in my younger years.

Among the most popular New Year's resolutions are lose weight, exercise, earn/save more money, improve diet, read more books, take better care of oneself, have a happy attitude, and many other things.


Looking forward to a new year with a fresh start can make it more exhilarating and revitalizing. It has been my previous experience that if I stay focused on all my resolutions for more than 2 to 3 weeks that I have exceeded my previous attempts.


New Year's resolutions are exciting to begin with, but then they lose their luster as the excitement wears off.

Change is hard. Breaking old habits and establishing new ones can be exhausting but even today I still like the idea of starting new resolutions. Wow, this is a lot, but I am inspired and ready to run fresh out of the starting gate to take on this new year, 2023, in fine fashion.


I have found if I look at just two or three things that are important to me to accomplish over the next three to four months, I can quantify them into an attainable goal. This keeps me from the trap of becoming discouraged because I do not see results quickly. For me success comes by changing a few small actions or behaviors daily instead of giant steps.


These small changes help create new habits. And a change of habit is the consequence of small and deliberate actions or behavior changes that are quite simple to implement and to track my results. Look at the following objectives.



OBJECTIVE: To lose weight I need to change my eating habits. In order to do this, I will stop eating lunch in a restaurant and begin taking a healthy lunch to eat at work. Now I monitor this by counting the number of days that I take my lunch. With an objective of five days, I can see how I ended the week. I may not see any weight change, but I am working on a method that will cause it to happen. I experience daily success even though I might not have lost 1 pound.


OBJECTIVE: To read more books, I need to change my reading habits. I need to identify how many pages I need to read per week, then break those pages down into daily quotas and track my progress. You can see how this works over time. Remember I am working on a method that will cause it to happen.


Slow and resolute wins the race.

Because it can take weeks to start seeing the results of the goals I want to attain. But if I will continue taking small steps and monitor them, I will see the wins and I win weekly when I tally up my results and compare them to my objective. To help me track my progress, I use the weekly display, which enables me to examine and assess how I am progressing toward my target on a daily and weekly basis.


You can get your weekly display form by clicking the link jerrydclark.com/weeklydisplay to download.


For both me and others, this is an incredibly motivating and helpful exercise.


There is fruit in establishing resolutions.


Are your resolutions resolute? Look for the blind spots.




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What I don't know I don't know about myself


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