Creative Commons License photo credit: drewzuckerman

I recently read a statistic which indicates as many as 75% of New Year’s resolutions are abandoned within a week of New Year’s Day.

Albert Einstein once said “you cannot solve a problem with the same mindset that created it.”  The problem with New Year’s resolutions is it takes more than just making a quick list of things you want to change.

You may genuinely want to lose weight. The problem is, the short-term pleasure of eating junk food and sleeping late overpowers your desire to adopt a healthy lifestyle conducive to weight loss. What would happen if your doctor told you, “adopt a healthier lifestyle or you will be dead in 30 days.” Could you do it? Of course you could! The immediate threat of death over one’s head is a powerful motivator. Suddenly the pain of the end of your life is stronger than any short-term pleasure attained by living an unhealthy lifestyle.

Your present mindset and your reactions to life’s circumstances has set the stage for life as you know it. There is a constant dialogue going on in your head. This dialogue is so powerful and automatic most people barely even notice it.

Here’s how it goes: January 2, 2011 and your alarm is set to go off an hour earlier so you can go to the gym to workout or take a brisk jog around your neighborhood. Beep, beep, beep: wakie-wakie: up-and-at-’em Sunshine! At that instant, something happens in your mind that happens so quickly you might be too groggy to even notice it. Your internal dialogue quickly asks “Do I REALLY want to get up this early?” Unfortunately, the answer for the newly resolved exerciser is, “not today, maybe tomorrow.” Before you realize, it’s late December and time to make new resolutions.

The way to fulfill your resolution to get up early and exercise is to change your internal mindset and dialogue. What if the question that sprang to mind was something like “what’s the healthiest thing for me to do right now” or “how much better am I going to look and feel once I lose 20 pounds and have a healthier body?” To fulfill a New Year’s resolution to get up early and exercise requires a different mindset. It requires you interrupt your normal thought process that allows you to make excuses in the first place. Interrupting and replacing your internal dialogue isn’t easy but it can be done by deliberately focusing your attention on the existence of the dialogue in the first place. Once you are aware of your internal dialogue and how quickly and easily this dialogue sabotages your efforts to change, shifting that dialogue to a more productive and empowering line of questioning is much easier.

You mind is pre-wired to ask questions and immediately seek out answers to it’s own questions. The trick is, reprogramming your mind to ask questions that empower change.