3 days to the New Year

There are three days left until the start of 2013. It is time not only to start making New Years Resolutions, but also making a PLAN to carry out those New Years Resolutions.

Nothing happens without a plan.

You cannot just wake up on Tuesday morning, January 1, and just like that change all the bad habits that you have spent a life time engraining into yourself.

Most people's New Year's Resolutions drop by the wayside after about a week, because such a sudden change in attitude and behavior is hard to maintain.

Instead of a sudden change in behavior, make it a gradual change.

With a gradual change, you will never feel as if you have failed in your New Year's Resolution, because your resolutions are to start the processes to change, not to change overnight.

So, if you're reading this blog for the first time, your goal on January 1 should not be to stop eating chocolate cold turkey. Your goal should be to cut down on chocolate by eating only one candy bar a day if you typically eat two, cutting back to two cookies a day for dessert if you habitually have four, and so on.

In the same way, don't plan suddenly to bike 10 miles a day if you haven't been on a bike in ten years. And if you've never walked more than a couple of blocks at a time, don't make a resolution to walk or job 10 miles a day. No. You bike a mile, or you walk a mile, and you gradually build up to your goal to bike 10 miles a day sometime in the year.

Everything's a process. It's like writing a book. Writing 60,000 words in one day for a book is impossible. But if you write just 100 measly words a day, you'd have 30,000 words written in a year. If you write 200 words a day, you'd have a whole book done by the end of a year.

So get to work on those New Years Resolutions, and remember they are year-long resolutions. Which means you have a whole year to bring them to fruition, and you can if you work on them every day.