Keeping Fit: New Year’s resolutions: Why it is just as easy to succeed as fail

Published 2:00 pm Saturday, December 30, 2023

Every year people make New Year’s resolutions and every year for too many people those resolutions are abandoned within several days or weeks of making them. That’s too bad, because as I learned from business philosopher Jim Rohn, achieving New Year’s resolutions can be just as easy as abandoning them, if you know how. Here is some of what he taught me.

The formula for failure

This may sound obvious, but failure is almost never a single, one-time event. We don’t just fail to achieve a goal overnight. No, what happens is we make a bad choice, then we make it again, and again, and again. In other words, failure is nothing more than a few errors in judgment repeated every day.

Learning what’s important

Now the question we must ask ourselves is “Why would someone be so stupid as to make an error in judgment and then make it again every day?” The answer is simple: Because they do not think it is important. On their own, our little daily choices don’t seem to amount to much. A minor oversight, a bad decision, a wasted hour just doesn’t seem so bad when there isn’t any immediate impact. Most of the time, we escape from having to pay the consequences of our wrong choices right away. Since the sky did not fall in on us yesterday, probably the action is safe to repeat today. But, oh. We must be smarter than that.

Failure’s subtlety

Failure’s great danger is its subtlety. In the area of health, people who eat too many of the wrong kinds of food find the joy of the moment overshadows the possibility of any future reckoning. It doesn’t seem to matter.

Those who smoke or drink too much are in the same boat, making poor choices day after day after year after year … because I haven’t gotten sick yet and it doesn’t seem to matter. But friends, it does matter, and since we live in the now, all those days of feeling good while accumulating the price of our errors won’t matter when we are feeling sick and dealing with the weight problems, heart problems, liver problems, sugar problems, etc.

The formula for success

Now we are ready for the good news. Just like the formula for failure is small errors in judgment repeated every day, the formula for success is also a few, simple disciplines practiced every day. Now here then is the million dollar question: “How can we recognize the errors we keep doing in the formula for failure and turn them into the disciplines required in the formula for success”? The answer is wisdom. and one prime characteristic of wisdom is that it thinks about tomorrow — about next week, next year, the next five years, about eternity. Both success and failure involve future consequences from actions (or the lack of them) taken today.

The key principleSo often when people fail at a resolution it is because the objective is too big and vague. They fail to see the tiny steps they can take each day that over time will bring them the success they seek. If I asked you “Could you write a 400-page book in 2005?” most of you I think would say no. But if I asked you “Could you write one and one-fourth pages today?” most would say yes. It is the accumulated weight of little right choices made every day that make for great achievements over time. The same is true in building health and wellness.

Here at the Bradley Wellness Center we have created two 3-6 month coaching packages (one for losing weight, the other for gaining muscle) and the entire program is about identifying all the small steps that lead to success and implementing them one small step at a time with the help of a trainer or accountability partner. Don’t fail with your New Year’s resolutions this year, give us a call at (706) 278-WELL and let us tell you about the many affordable options for help and coaching you can receive to get healthy and fit in 2024.

Thomas Morrison is a fitness coordinator at the Bradley Wellness Center.