Category Archive: New Year’s Resolution

The Living Experiment: New Year

Posted on January 22, 2019 in: New Year's Resolution
BY PILAR GERASIMO AND DALLAS HARTWIG | JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2019

The New Year brings a barrage of “New You!” promises. Learn how to get past those tired tropes and explore fresh options for conscious change.

For many of us, the New Year brings a fresh start — an opportunity to get a new outlook on life. But it also brings a predictable flood of warmed-over media messages and “no-fail” plans that fail to deliver.

So in this installment of The Living Experiment, we talk about the paradoxical nature of the New Year experience, and how you can make it work for you.

Whether it’s opting out of fad diets and workouts or embracing the long-standing tradition of reflecting on your right-now priorities, we encourage you to investigate your desires for change and the motivations behind them.

We share expert theories about why our goals tend to elude us and offer experiments to help you identify and embrace the New Year adjustments that matter to you.

Year-End Depletion

  • Coming off the holiday season, we are often tired, depleted, and vulnerable to being sold on dramatic solutions and interventions.
  • The media and marketers seize on this opportunity with aggressive campaigns that tap into our feelings of inadequacy and shame.
  • Buying into the constant exhortations to have “your best year ever!” or “your best body ever!” can backfire, fueling magical thinking — or cynicism and apathy.
  • The biggest challenges to making sustainable change typically require shifting time and resources away from current outflows and renegotiating current commitments, not just pushing yourself harder.

The Value of Preparation

  • Seasonally speaking, the dead of winter is a great time for contemplation, reflection, review, and planning, but not necessarily the best time to spring into action.
  • Consider, without jumping to solutions or resolutions: What parts of your life are calling for change, and where are you being invited to grow as a person?
  • It’s also worth asking, with self-compassion: Why have you not already made or sustained this change? Hint: It’s not lack of willpower.
  • Locate your current position on the Readiness to Change spectrum. Know that it’s normal to repeatedly move back and forth between the stages of contemplation, preparation, and action.

Investigative Insight

  • Rather than making a long list of “shoulds,” consider focusing on one important area and working through a deeper change process (see the experiments below).
  • Can you reframe your perceived problems (e.g., weight, debt, bad habits) as symptoms of underlying challenges? Often, these come down to excess stress, competing values or commitments, vague boundaries, or unaddressed psycho-emotional issues.
  • Self-sabotage of our goals is often based on dissonance between our current identity and the behaviors required of the person we want to be.
  • Consider trying on your chosen capability or habit, even if you don’t feel ready to fully embrace it. Taking a small step or running a small experiment can help you incrementally shift your identity to match that behavior.
  • Finish the sentence “I am a person who . . . ” as though you have already made your chosen change. Notice: How does that feel in your body-mind?
  • Keep in mind that change is inherently disruptive. Short-term chaos is often the first step toward long-term joy.

Experiments

Pilar suggests:
1) Make an Immunity Map by following the steps in the article “How to Overcome Immunity to Change” (available at “How to Overcome Immunity to Change“).

2) Create a Goal Flower using the “Cultivate Your Goals” section of Pilar’s Refine Your Life workbook (available at ­PilarGerasimo.com/resources).

Dallas suggests: Look at the changes you want to make for 2019, and articulate the motivation behind them. Ask yourself: Am I doing this out of fear or out of love? Replace a behavior that has typically been fear-based with one done out of love. It may be the same action, but with a different motivation in play.

Listen and Learn: Check out this and other episodes of The Living Experiment podcast at LivingExperiment.com. Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Stitcher.

 adapted this column from their top-rated podcast, The Living Experiment. Dallas is cofounder of Whole30 and the New York Times best-selling coauthor of The Whole30 and It Starts With Food.

Original article can be found on ExperienceLife.com

All the Awesome To-Dos in the New Year

Posted on December 29, 2016 in: Chicago Half Marathon, Goal Setting, Health and Wellness, Inspiration, New Year's Resolution

Reprinted with permission from Experience Life

· Dec 29, 2016

Do you set too-big goals and resolutions? What I’ve learned from life coaches on how to get real.

My New Year’s–resolution lists looked the same for years: Lose weight! Save more money! Take a trip! Spend more time with friends and family! Read more books!

They were broad, overarching ideas that seemed like the right things to aim for — the goals we all tend to set our sights on.

It wasn’t until I met with a life coach that I started to understand why these goals remained on my wish list each year, with little progress made toward completion.

STEP 1

First, I had to ask myself: Why were these goals important to me? Were these my goals, or other people’s consensus on the goals we should set for our resolutions? So I took stock of each one.

  • Lose weight: I’d like to feel good in my body and move freely without pain. I’d like to be strong so I can accomplish other fitness feats.
  • Save more money: Because why not? Someday my car is sure to need replacement, or we could use the money for an excursion, and it’s always nice to have a security blanket.
  • Take a trip: I love to travel, and there are so many places I’d like to visit. But the biggest barrier always ends up being: How to afford it?
  • Spend more time with friends and family: Is it really about more time or making that time we have feel like more quality time? I bet we’d all wish for more time for visits, but we all have demanding schedules, so really, it’s about setting plans that allow for deeper connections.
  • Read more books: Always worthwhile, but I do read a lot. Maybe I can skip this one?

STEP 2

Next, my life coach and other experts would say I need to make these goals more specific and doable. What actual steps will I take to accomplish them — each day, each week, and each month? What are my mini milestones to celebrate along the way?

  • Lose weight: Specifically, I’d like to lose 30 pounds in six months. It can be a very doable goal when I will: plan meals and pack healthy food for the week on Sundays; lift weights two to three times a week and walk three to four; set a timer to get up from my desk every hour; drink eight 8-oz. glasses of water each day; go to bed by 10 p.m. each night. Reevaluate my plan each month based on my progress, and decide on additional resources I may need to acquire, such as a workout buddy, personal trainer, nutritionist, etc.
  • Save more money: I will set an auto-deduction from my checking to my savings account for $50 per month, and will reassess in six months to see if I can increase the amount.
  • Take a trip: The savings will help with this, but instead of setting my sights on Fuji, how about a shorter, smaller, and cheaper trip to San Diego?
  • Spend more quality time with friends and family: Call up my loved ones and set up a fun adventure where we can make some great memories.
  • Read more books. Nix this goal and stay focused on the others.

STEP 3

This tip I found the most helpful for the big one we all talk about: lose weight.

When we think of this goal, one life coach told me, it’s all about deprivation. It’s about what we’ll force our bodies to do and what we’ll restrict instead of what we’ll gain and how our bodies will improve.

Instead of “losing weight,” she told me, say, “I want to get stronger.” By recasting this goal as one that will build on where you’re starting from versus what you’ll strip away, it makes it more desirable for your brain. It’s one of power — “I’m just going to get better in this body!”

Now, I will admit that it was hard for me to embrace: As a woman, I feel like society has long encouraged us to get smaller, slighter, more delicate. More recently, as we have been emboldened to love our curves and muscles, and to stand in a place of power, it’s become easier for me to go for that goal. And a surprising fact I learned from weightlifting, which you can read more about in “Lift to Lose Weight”: Building muscles helps you lose weight. Double win!

This excellent — and FREE! — six-month workout plan for our “Strong, Fast, and Fit” program offers a simple format for success with support.

STEP 4

Set mini goals and celebrations along the way, and for crying out loud, cut yourself some slack!

This bit of advice was the nicest any coach ever told me, the ever-crazed perfectionist. We’re all trying our best, and we should get an A for effort. As we move forward toward reaching our goals, they may evolve, or we may decide they weren’t crucial to our values after all. Once we get there, we may find our vision is different than we imagined, whether good or bad in our eyes.

Know that it’s your vision and your dream, and you can dictate what that looks like at any point, whether you’re setting New Year’s resolutions or revising a 10-year plan.

During my interview with author Danielle LaPorte, she shared this refreshing take on balance: It doesn’t exist. (Hear more from her in the video below.)

Really, I realized that this concept of “balance” was some magical ideal that we all shared, like the typical New Year’s resolutions. There’s been a mutual agreement that “balance” is desirable and amazing, and we think we know what it looks like, but really, it varies for everyone. It can’t be defined because it’s your own interpretation.

So as you consider your New Year’s resolutions, think about your own values that guide your vision.

Happy dreaming!