4 Keys to making successful New Year's resolutions!

If you are keen to start your year off right and really stick to your New Year’s resolutions, then read on.

HOWEVER, if you haven’t yet watched Martin’s video on the 3 biggest mistakes people make with New Year’s resolutions, then I suggest you click the link above and watch that first.

Done that? Great.

Now that you have seen what to avoid when MAKING your new years resolutions, the real question is:

How do I stick with my New Year’s resolutions so that I can achieve something?

It’s the perennial struggle. As Martin talked about in the last video, it is important that you make you goals right in the first place, but its equally as important to know how to make them work for you.

in today’s video, Martin talks us through his tips to really set yourself up for success with your resolutions, how do you prioritise, and how do you turn them into habits that become part of your routine for the rest of your life time, not just while your levels of will power hold out.

As always, for those of you who would prefer to read, the video has been transcribed below.

Hi, Martin here from Align chiropractic and this is the second in our series of New Year's resolutions videos. 

Last time we went over the biggest mistakes that people make in setting New Year’s resolutions,, and today we're going to flip that around and give you some really simple tips that you can use straight away, to make the next year the healthiest year for you. 

The most important thing when you're making resolutions to improve your health is, first of all:

Start really, small. 

So if you're wanting to get fit and part of that is you're wanting to increase your upper body strength and you are going to do push-ups, you might be able to do 10 the first day, that doesn't mean you can do 20 and 30 and 40 day after day after day. 

That sort of radical change can get you hurt, and it will tax your willpower really fast which is no good at all. 

If you start really small, the goal on day one is to do one pushup, and if we expand that out you can apply the same thing to running, to going to the gym, to doing any sort of healthy habit; it's easy to succeed. 

When you succeeded, when you've successfully been able to do just a very small behavior but you repeat that small, easy to achieve habit day after day, it starts to build a habit.

Habits are the superpower behind successful resolutions. 

What I mean by that is a habit doesn't cost you in willpower; you do them automatically. 

If your habit in the morning is you get up and have a glass of water, you don't have to force yourself to do it, it happens automatically. 

The thing that that derails most resolutions is where we’re relying on willpower, doing something that's too big, too ugly, too uncomfortable, that we have to will ourselves to do it day after day, and then we wake up by morning we don't feel like it, and all of a sudden our streak is gone, our lack of willpower has won. 

Small resolutions where we're looking for just a little bit of success is much more successful. 

It also avoids us injuring ourselves and the general if we're doing a physical exercise, you're looking to increase it by a maximum, not a minimum, a maximum of 10% a week while building a habit.

That keeps it easy to succeed and it gives you your muscles, your ligaments, your tendons and your nervous system time to adapt to a new pattern of behaviour while are you building that habit. 

Make it easier to succeed and hard to fail. 

So our second thing is:

Pick the most important thing. 

We spoke last time of having too many resolutions being a problem. 

Just pick one area, one resolution that you're gonna stick to and the most important one. so if your goal was not so much about getting fit but more about losing weight, you've got a choice there, you can either have a resolution where you're going to change some aspect of your eating where you going to eat more vegetables or you’re going to eat less sugar or something like that, or you could look to exercise more and all the research shows that if you want to lose weight, for 99% of people actually, diet trumps exercise. 

You can’t work out past a bad diet. 

So, dial in the diet first because then you can build in habits before you try to change too many things. 

You also create a really positive domino effect where once you've started eating better you kind of naturally feel like being more active and exercising. 

You get this virtuous cycle where you eat better, so you exercise more, and you exercise more, you feel like eating better and so the cycle goes, and you can build a much healthier you with small, incremental and achievable changes.  

If you're only able to change one thing, again it taps into this small change makes it easy to succeed, rather than creating this horrible lifestyle that is so alien to you that you want to stop it the moment that you can. 

Third point is:

Don’t go it alone!

Rather than going solo and trying to do it just on their own willpower and their own resources, If you get a buddy, somebody else who wants to make the same change, or somebody else who will hold you accountable, then it taps into the way that we're wired.

We're wired to be social creatures and you increase your chance of successfully sticking with a resolution if you get a buddy. 

Somebody who’s going to check in with you once a week to make sure you've done what you’ve committed to. 

You can even ramp it up further, by adding consequences. 

One of the the ones that I think is really amazingly successful is that there is research that shows that if you have a negative consequence for if you don't stick to your agreed resolution of eating more vegetables every day or of eating five servings of vegetables every day, you have to make a sizeable donation to an organization that you hate, so for example, if you are a Carlton supporter you have to give a thousand dollars to Collingwood and the way we're wired away from what we don’t want more towards what we do want, it’s a powerful incentive for people to stick to their resolutions. 

The fourth thing is,

If you’re getting physical, get a check up.

If you're doing a physical activity, you're doing a fitness oriented New Year's resolution, then I'm going to strongly suggest that you get a checkup. 

If you're a client of ours, or you'd like to be a client of ours, give us a call pop in we'll check to make sure that everything's working the way that it should, before you put your body under stresses that it's not used to, and related to that, we see soo many people who have ignored niggles and then end up with a more significant issue down the line. 

So if your body is giving you feedback that the new regime is creating a bit of stress for you, don't ignore that, get it dealt with quickly so that you're not derailed by injury in sticking to your resolution. 

I hope these videos will set you up for massive success in improving your health in the year ahead, shoot us a message and let us know what you think and what are new changes you're making in the year to come.