There are many reasons why you shouldn't wait for the New Year to make changes in your life. Here are a few:
- Reason 1: Waiting until the new year can actually set you back, because you'll have to spend time building momentum. You can start working on your aspirations at any time of year! Any minute! Any hour! Any meal!
- Reason 2: When we make resolutions on January 1st, we're often feeling motivated, but that motivation can quickly fade. Motivation alone is not enough. Here are two schools on how you can bypass that fickle motivation monkey:
- You work on establishing the prompt to do the new behavior as well as ensuring the behavior is something you are able to do on the worst days. Habit stacking is an excellent prompt. Say you want to read more at night. Then a habit stack is after you brush your teeth for the night, you find a nice place to read (Even if it is one sentence! Thanks, BJ Fogg for your brilliant Tiny Habits book).
- Hypnotherapy can accelerate that new neural pathway by working with the subconscious mind (the automatic pilot) not the conscious one (which tends to only remember after you forgot to set your alarm to get up and go for that morning walk).
- Reason 3: New Year's resolutions are often unrealistic thanks to that surge of motivation. Getting started when you are ready, not an arbitrary date, allows you the freedom of setting realistic goals that you are more likely to achieve (This hits on the ability factor that BJ Fogg has in his behavior model). Let’s break this down with an example: You know weight training has a ton of benefits but you just haven’t been able to consistently go to the gym. Maybe the gym is too big! What if you went smaller? What if each day in your home you did one set for one body part? If that was your path then by the end of month you would already be well on your way to achieving success for just less than a minute a day versus hours of fretting to about missing a gym work out 3 times a week (Thanks, BJ Fogg for your Tiny Habits And James Clear for your Atomic Habits! You both bring the energy and the science around going small!)
