Keeping those resolutions!

Posted by Fiona Harrold | No Comment

New Year Resolutions are in the air and radio stations up and down the country are devoting entire shows to them, holding phone-ins on the subject and fetching in ‘experts’ to advise on the best way to handle them. I’ve done at least 5 such shows myself this week!

What’s the big deal? Why the fuss?

The big deal is that people don’t seem able to maintain their momentum, their initial high level of motivation. New Year resolve peters out and we are left feeling demoralised, dispirited and disappointed with ourselves. Record numbers of us join a gym in January, but only a fraction of us are still there by the third week of February.

Why? How come? What happens to our motivation?

Here’s the thing. I believe motivating oneself, initially, is relatively easy and straightforward. Keeping it is the real challenge. The cliché that taking the first step is the hardest is a nonsense. Actually, it’s probably the easiest.

Working yourself into an ecstasy of desire or desperation is not that difficult. Staying keen, keeping on, holding the faith, maintaining momentum is the real challenge. Our mistake is to assume that because motivation is there at the outset, bold and strong, that it’ll be there for the whole run, doing its thing, driving us onwards, just as long as we need it.

We take it for granted. And then, when we falter, we blame our lack of discipline. Au contraire. Look to your motivation every time.

The trick is to grasp that motivation needs regular flexing, working on, pumping and generally attending to. Otherwise it flags, depletes, runs out and before you know, you’ve lost sight of the original reasons why you wanted to make that change in the first place.

Motivation is fluid. It can fluctuate from day to day, morning to evening. If you need to maintain a steady and large supply, pay it attention. Work on it. It’ll be worth it. Feeling driven by heightened desire or downright desperation makes the transition from there to here so much easier and more likely.

One of the reasons why coaching works so well is simply that a good coach can feed your motivation so that you’re operating on a continuously high motivation level, with few dips, and you recover fast. You stay motivated and you get the results you want.