How to turn your New Year’s Resolutions into all year results

It’s the beginning of a new year, a clean slate, a new beginning and another chance to reach your goals. With renewed motivation, you are choosing your goals for the next 365 days. However, chances are that, like so many others, you will give up on your resolutions within the next 30 days, leaving you feeling defeated and not good enough. Yet, the most common reason why people don’t reach their goals has nothing to do with them not being good enough, but rather their goals and how they approach them, creating more stress than motivation.

My guest on Empowerment Radio this week is Jaya Jaya Myra, who is known as the “Wellness Lifestyle Expert” and expert on mind-body wellness, stress management and natural, healthy living. She’s a best-selling author, and Creator of “The WELL Method.” After healing herself naturally from debilitating fibromyalgia, Myra developed The WELL Method to teach others the 4 cornerstones of a healthy, purpose-driven life.

Here is what Myra says about how to make New Year’s Resolutions work:

“Many people see the new year as a great time to set goals. It’s a “new year, new you” mentality, but research from U.S. News and World Report shows that only 20 percent of us succeed with our goals. In other words, 80 percent of us are likely to fail. Yikes, why is this? 

“The main reason that New Year’s Resolutions fail, in my opinion, is due to two compounding factors. The first is that many people don’t know how to create new habits. Creating habits is hard work. It requires consistency in a new routine and working toward your goal every day. Consistency is the only way to create new neural connections in the brain that support what you’re working toward. Once new neural connections are formed, your new routine will become a habit and will be much easier to maintain, but getting there is the challenge.

“If you’ve moved beyond this hurdle, kudos to you, but you still may not succeed unless you’ve tackled the second problem: Most people don’t have a daily routine doing something enjoyable.

“How can you expect yourself to keep a New Year’s Resolution regarding something that you’ve struggled with when you don’t even do something daily that you’re good at and you enjoy? Think of it as low-energy output versus high-energy output. It takes much less effort to do fun things or relaxing things than it does to do challenging ones, right? Right.

“No matter how mindful you are, we all have limited time and energy to get everything done: How much energy is realistic to put toward a new difficult goal, versus keeping up with everything already on your plate?

“If you create a daily routine doing something you enjoy before you set any other kind of resolution, you’ll have given yourself some momentum. This will support the kind of confidence and commitment you need to take on a tougher goal.

“Cultivating happiness through this new daily habit also gives you more energy to accomplish the rest of your goals. People who are happier are healthier and have a more positive outlook on life. People with a consistent daily routine also feel more confident in themselves, because the mind craves consistency in order to be healthy.

“Now let’s look at the low-energy output versus high-energy output paradigm. When you acclimate yourself to constantly putting a low amount of energy into something new, it’s relatively easy to increase that to a high-energy output; more-so than it would be to go from nothing to everything all at once. It’s much harder to get a sitting stone to roll than to speed up a stone that’s already rolling. In other words, small mindful habits turn into bigger ones, giving you the ability to make difficult changes.

“I have a few mindful things I do daily that help me stay positive, focused, and happy. One is to start each day with a cup of tea. Another daily habit is to go for a long walk. I do both of these things because I enjoy them, not because I feel obligated to. Both of these things give me the support I need to tackle my bigger goals. What will it be for you? What can you commit to each day that makes you happy? “

Join Myra and I this Thursday, January 16th at 9AM PT / 12PM ET and learn how her approach to mind-body wellness, spirituality and purpose, can help you to make 2020 your breakthrough year. You may also join us on Facebook Live.