2017 is a new opportunity.
It is a chance to change your story, but it often doesn’t go the way you planned and by February you’re back to your old habits.
One reason for this is that you haven’t really changed any of your habits at all, and just used your willpower to force yourself to defy your own programmed responses. When your willpower is drained by work or stress, you go back into your old routine saying, “Just this once, it won’t hurt.”
A way you can try to hold yourself to your change is to publish your intentions and let others remind you to do what you said you would. If it is just written on a piece of paper in your house, your new year’s resolutions might simply be thrown in the bin and nobody would be the wiser.
Publish what you want to do this year and tell your friends to hold you to it.
Also try to focus on one resolution. Having many resolutions will leave some to fall through the cracks when you absent-mindedly forget your new self. We’ve all been in a place where we’ve said “oh well” when we have forgotten what we promised we would do.
One resolution that is strongly held is more than enough, and make it doable within the year so you can complete it and gbet that rush of dopamine from checking it off your list next year.
My New Year’s Resolution 2017
This year my main goal is to become 100% remote in terms of work. I really want to be able to pack up and take a month of holiday without needing to bargain with gatekeepers at any company I’m working at, and rather than look for a mythical job that has as much holiday as I want, it would be better to work entirely remotely.
Please hold me to that!