It’s the first week of January and you’re pumped to make changes in your life. Bravo!
Whether it’s to improve your fitness, get a handle on your finances, boost your mental health, lose weight, or eat healthier, you couldn’t have chosen a better time to get a fresh start.
We’re here to cheer you on so you make it to the finish line.
The challenge is, what makes this year different from others?
You know that quote, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?”
Misattributed to Albert Einstein, it can be found in various forms as early as the 1800s.
We also like this variation from the 1980s attributed to Jessica Porter, an educator and counselor, "If you always do what you’ve always done, you always get what you’ve always gotten.”
We’ve written before that the percent of people who actually succeed in keeping their New Year's resolutions may be as low as 7%.
Maybe you’re in that exclusive group.
But if you’re not, and you’ve seen your New Year's resolutions fall by the wayside in the past, we have a question for you: What are you doing differently this year that is going to help you reach your goals this year?
If you haven’t included boosting resilience on your list of new things to try, we’d like to invite you to consider it. That’s because resilience is crucial for good performance and wellbeing.
Resilience is a key element that helps you stick to your resolutions once the honeymoon glow of a fresh start has dimmed and hard work, distractions, disruptions threaten your resolve.
One quick step you can take right now is to watch your language. We don’t mean what you say to other people or reducing the number of f-bombs you may have gotten used to using. We mean your self-talk, how you talk to yourself about yourself.
It’s easy when we run into trouble to let automatic thoughts like, “I’m just not good at this,” “I’ll never get it,” or “This is too hard” get the best of you.
Carol Dweck’s breakthrough work on growth mindset, Martin Seligman’s positive psychology, and the work of other experts who study how we talk to ourselves, demonstrate that changing your self-talk can also change outcomes.
Simply put, trash talk to yourself about yourself is demotivating and produces poorer outcomes than self-talk that fosters curiosity, acceptance, open-mindedness, and grit. All things that help you fulfill your New Year's resolutions.
You can’t reduce your trash talk with a simple “just” don’t do it. You must have a new language to use in its place.
That’s where we want to help.
To get you started, we’ve created a simple self-talk guide that hundreds of people around the world have found transformative.
It’s called the Six Magic Word Pairs.
Watch this video to learn more about the Six Magic Word Pairs.
Take the Be Your Own Best Coach Psychological Flexibility Self-Assessment to discover how well your mindset can keep you afloat when the rapids of the unexpected change threaten to divert your progress or capsize your ship. Do you have what it takes to stay the course?