Why New Year’s Resolutions are Crap

Happy New Year everybody!

January is usually the time of the year when every personal trainer gets excited. They get to create marketing about the New Year and attempt to get a lot of new clients who want to get healthy for the year ahead. I have in fact been one of these trainers and have tried cheesy marketing for the last 3 years around the New Year. Well, not this year and let me tell you why.

New Year’s Resolutions are usually made in between glasses of champagne and hugging your friends in an inebriated state. They are rarely made with any deep level of thought or strategy. It should then come as a very little surprise that they are not met.

I sent you an e-mail last month about the motivation of pain and pleasure. The activity in that e-mail will help you enormously in this process. The ideas presented here are a repeat of these concepts but I believe that they are so powerful and worth saying again

I am in the business of helping people get healthy. People need a BIG reason to get healthy. This reason needs to be so powerful that it will help overcome the obstacles that will occur along the way. So if you are looking to get healthy in 2012 the start by asking yourself WHY.

The next step you need to ask yourself is what obstacles will get in the way of you being healthy in 2012?For example, you may want to be healthy but find stepping away from work too much of a demand. Be honest with yourself as you identify these obstacles.

The last question you need to ask yourself is ‘IS IT WORTH IT?’ There is going to be cost (time, money, etc) on your mission to get healthy and you really need to be confident that it is worth it. My advice would be to write all the benefits down of being healthier. This will help you in making the wisest decision.

If you go through this process and discover that getting healthy may be too difficult or that you don’t really feel that strongly about it then that’s ok. Its better you find out now instead of a months’ time when you feel disheartened and say that getting healthy is just too difficult.

The last step in the process is creating strategy. You may want to see your GP and get full check-up so you can see where your current health status is and where the focus needs to be. You will need an exercise and nutrition plan that is proven to be effective and get results.

So I am not promoting New Year’s resolutions this year but rather I am promoting sustainable behavioural change that works. If you want to get healthy and have a big WHY then please come and see Coastal Bodies and we can help you with the strategy.