By now, you’ve likely decided where you’ll focus your energy in this year ahead.  Or, you’ve decided to pursue a resolution or goal.  To make this happen, to keep your promise to yourself, here are a couple of tips to help you on your journey.

• Take your big goal and divide it into small, manageable chunks.  If you want 2016 to be the year of fitness but haven’t worked out in a while, try three 20-minute sessions a week for the first month and grow from there.  If you want to lose a total of 15-pounds, start with your focus on 5-pounds.  Once you’ve lost those 5, you’ll be proud and energized to take on another 5 whereas if you lost 5 and you still have 10 more to go, it may seem just too hard.
• Congratulate your successes, encourage yourself if you slip.  That’s why small goals are so much more powerful – you get to congratulate yourself a whole lot and feel proud of what you’ve achieved.  Besides, smaller goals allow you to prove to yourself that you can do it, whatever you’ve decided ‘it’ is.
• Plan for slippage.  Think about all the things that can get in your way of getting to your goal.  Decide how you will foil the demons that want to stand in the way of your success.  If a battle pursues inside your head with old habits trying to combat your new you, decide what you want to say to those old habits.  Plan for this.  Or, it could be a friend won’t be as encouraging as you’d expected; plan how to handle that.  Also, don’t be surprised when you encounter inertia – you just don’t want a salad tonight . . . or, you can’t face the gym today . . . or, you think, “I’m just too tired to go to that job fair”.  Making a change is a big decision and you will experience internal resistance.  Rather than let your mind and old habits win, decide how you will manage all the affronts to your New Year Goal.
• Tackle one thing at a time.  Yes, you’ll likely be successful if you combine fitness and nutrition but your success will rest on taking on those small goals, not an earth-shifting massive goal.  On the other hand, if you want to focus on a new job, finding a new partner and making nutritional or fitness changes all at once, your chances of success are diminished.  Aside from the fact that our brain likes to keep things orderly, very few humans are able to make a lot of changes all at once.

Yesterday, on New Year Day 2, we discussed planning and action as the steps to your goal.  Today, on New Year Day 3, we’ve added a few success tips to get you to your goal.  Make 2016 your year of success.