Change Your Plan of Attack and Achieve Your New Year’s Resolutions

Happy New Year my lovelies!

As a new year begins, many of us start to think about our New Year’s resolutions. We evaluate the past year, thinking of all the things that we wanted to accomplish but didn’t. We see the New Year as the perfect time to create a new us.

Despite our best intentions, though, sometimes a resolution just doesn’t get resolved (oopsies!). Often we haven’t moved past the mere thought of a resolution and actually planned for our success. I want to help change this; I want to inspire you!

Use these tips to help you become the healthiest you in 2014:

1. Focus on your feelings. Tapping into the emotions behind your resolutions will help you hold fast to your goals when you’re faced with temptation.

Sit down and first think about what will happen if you continue on your current course of action. How will poor food choices affect your energy level? Will the lack of energy that results from not exercising allow you to live your life the way you want? Tap into that pain and uncomfortableness. Your brain naturally wants to avoid this.

Next, think about what will happen if you change your current course of action. What will you be able to do with all the energy you have from eating well and exercising? Will achieving these goals help bring peace and balance to your life? Be specific: do you want to feel sexy, energetic, peaceful? You will naturally want to move toward what feels good. Danielle LaPorte’s The Desire Map is an excellent resource to help you really hone in on connecting your goals to your feelings.

2. Create your non-negotiables. Choose two things that you’ll do every day, no matter what, such as 20 minutes of exercise or meditation or preparing a healthy breakfast to start your day. My non-negotiables are exercise and water intake.

Choose activities that you can realistically accommodate in your schedule, and then put them in your calendar so they are part of your day. You’re preparing yourself for success, and that means making it easy to accomplish the tasks that will help you reach your goals.

3. Choose your small successes. Often we attempt to conquer an entire goal at once. Working toward a healthier lifestyle can be a large undertaking, and by only focusing on that one large achievement we’re setting ourselves up for potential failure.

Maybe drinking eight glasses of water a day seems too difficult to you. Start out with increasing your water intake by one glass a week. Does it seem unrealistic to prepare several healthy meals and snacks for yourself each day? Focus on creating one great meal per day to start with. Write out what your small successes will be and create a plan for upping the ante at predetermined intervals. If you work to create doable habits, you’re much more likely to achieve your goals.

Bonus tip: know how to do what you want to do. Sometimes we know what we want to accomplish and how it will make us feel, and we want it so badly, but we don’t know how to get there. We’re not perfect, and we don’t know everything, so sometimes it’s best to tap into resources that will help you. I’ve got some great new ways I’ll be cooking up to serve you in the new year, like my Cooking Club on February 5th!

Let’s help each other out: share your best tip for achieving your New Year’s resolutions!

Want to help your friends this New Year as well? Be sure to share this with them!