The New Year has always been a time for looking back to the past, and more importantly, forward to the coming year. It’s a time to reflect on the changes we want (or need) to make and resolve to follow through on those changes.

Quite often if they last a week into the New Year you’re probably doing well – and then you’re left with a feeling of failure… resolutions are often temporary.  Have you found yourself making any of these New Year Resolution and feel deflated as you have given up already?…

• Fit in fitness – “I have no motivation”
• Tame the bulge – “I will never lose any weight”
• Quit smoking – “I have tried before and failed”
• Enjoy Life More – “I feel so low”
• Quit or reduce drinking – “A few glasses of wine help me sleep”
• Learn or do something new – “I have no confidence to try”
• Get more organised – “I chase my tail”

Your focus

You are so often spending time focusing on what you don’t want in your life or on the excuses why it won’t happen rather than what you want to happen, which is the innate desire to be happy.

As we head into the New Year, resolutions to ‘lose weight’, ‘stop procrastinating’, and ‘get a boyfriend’ are abound. But what if, after years of failed attempts at goal setting, you decide that all you want out of the new year is to be happy? What if having a flat stomach and being more productive are just by-products of happiness?

What if everything falls into place precisely because you’re not setting yourself boundaries for success and measuring your joy in terms of their achievement?

This will prevent the influx of people admitting they’ve failed their resolutions just a few days or weeks in. People vow to hit the gym as soon as the festive season is over. They promise to eat healthily, to quit smoking, and to read more.

Weeks in and they’ve made excuses not to go to the gym, eaten a McDonald’s after a heavy night out, and watched far too much Netflix to have time to open a book.

Different person

It’s about time we put this whole idea that a new year makes you a different person to bed. Because let’s face it, the only thing that really changes is the date. For some people, all they want to do is put the year behind them and focus on the next one.

But we seem to have this idea that going into a new year immediately eliminates all the bad that happened the year prior. It doesn’t. We make all these plans to start our ‘new’ selves, and we punish ourselves for not keeping to those plans as we fall back into the same ways of the year before.

It’s about time we stopped focusing on the calendar and stop it with the time limits altogether.

Knowing that you’re not forcing yourself to make these changes by a certain date will also give you confidence that if you have an off day, or you fall into old routine, you can pick things up and continue – rather than giving up then starting all over again next year.

So let’s stop it with the ‘New year, new me’, and focus on just the ‘new me’. This phrase is all about becoming who you aspire to be – and no timescale can be put on that.

Give yourself time to focus on how you want to be and feel rather the pressure on what you are going to do. The rest will follow. And I wish everyone all the best for the festive period.

2minds is on Facebook –  and on Twitter… @AlisonBlackler