why i gave up on resolutions

Years ago...like maybe 3 or 4 years, I gave up on making New Year's resolutions. It wasn't so much that I sucked at keeping them (although I did suck at keeping them...that just wasn't the reason I gave up on them), it was more about setting myself up for the impossible and then living a life of failures or the rest of the year. I couldn't beat myself up like that every year. 

Seriously, in the years that I did try to follow through with my resolutions, I can't think of one, NOT ONE, that I actually followed through with successfully!! So why even try?!

But I also can't live my life without making changes for the better when I see the need. So I decided to create short term goals for myself. And they didn't have to start at the beginning of each year. They could start when I was ready for them to start! I ain't gonna let the end of an old year and the beginning of a new one dictate when I can and cannot set goals for myself! (That might be a little bit of stubbornness and maybe a little rebellion there...)

Okay, so my point is this: achieving success for me means breaking down a big goal into something smaller; into attainable goals. For example: in order to change my eating habits, I struggled to change everything all at once. So instead I made small changes, one at a time: I worked at taking out my nighttime snack (I'm still not always successful with that one, stupid Pringles), and then I tried pulling some of the carbs (i.e. bread, pasta, rice and all things delicious and comforting) out and replacing them with more protein. I've also tried to increase the amount of water I drink on a daily basis (I heard that was good for you...) And then, biggest change of all, I cut out Starbucks almost completely! For those of you who know me and how I drank my strawberry iced tea nearly every day, you know this is kinda a big deal! But I wanted to begin to eliminate the amount of sugar I was consuming.

Now had I tried to make all those changes in a day or a week or even a month, I would have been a grumpy mess of a woman that no one would want to be around! I actually tried that once about a year and a half ago...have you heard of the Whole 30 Challenge?! It was a complete upheaval of all my bad dietary habits and that challenge rocked my world! But let me tell ya, there were a few days when I'm pretty sure no one wanted to be around me... 😳 

So I tell you all of that to tell you this: a New Year's resolution might seem completely overwhelming to you, but it doesn't have to be. If you can see yourself taking baby steps, then take baby steps to get there. If you fail once in a while, don't let those few steps backwards stop you from going forward again. Grant yourself a little grace in your failures and then keep going. Breaking a resolution once shouldn't be the end of trying to attain your goal. 

We've got this year, people! 2017 is ours!!! (In bits and pieces and baby steps...) but it's still ours!

KC