Avoid Blue Spring: Ways To Stick With Your Resolutions

Do you ever notice how everyone hits the ground running on January 1? It is the starting line for making everything right in your life — your career, your health, your relationships and more. The will is there, and you ride the wave of momentum — for about the first two weeks. Then the second half of the month begins, and your efforts begin to fade away. It seems like other things start to get in the way of your efforts, even though you are always thinking about those things in your life that you want to make better.

Then comes the crisis time when we are in the throes of Spring, and you have reached the end game. Life is pretty much disrupted before you attempt to reboot it. If you have been in hunkering down for the past few weeks, you may begin to feel an overwhelming sense of depression and defeat. You have arrived in what I call Blue Spring.

The truth is that Blue Spring can hit any time of the year because life can change at any moment whether it is an external calamity or personal adversity. It is what occurs when you set out on some new venture or self-help discipline and you aren't able to bring it to fruition. There are lessons in not meeting New Year's resolutions that you can use NOW and anytime that you begin something new. One of the most important things to remember is that when you take on something new, it is usually going to be a marathon and not a sprint. We are so immediate gratification-oriented as a society; we have to remember that most things worth having don't happen that way. So, you can strengthen your emotional and mental resolve by keeping these six factors in mind.

1. Don't take on too many resolutions. We only have so much bandwidth that we can invest in whatever we are doing. While many of us pride ourselves on being multitaskers, the truth is that we aren't as good at it as we think. If we take on only one thing that takes extra effort, we have to invest a great deal of brainpower and physical energy to try and bring it to reality. Now, if you are doing two or three other new ideas at the same time, it is impossible to give your all to any of them.

2. Know that some goals can be hard to achieve. Take weight loss as an example. If you set a goal of losing 20 pounds in a month, you may either give up on the target or be one cranky individual to be around. Doctors say losing one to two pounds a week is a good goal and gives you a better chance of keeping the weight off.

The same is true of a career goal, like increasing your office's productivity by 20% in three months. That sounds like it's too ambitious, and you are not going to have a happy working environment. Having goals that are a bit of a stretch but attainable is best. Meeting those intermediate goals creates momentum to get you to your grand objective, though it might take longer.

3. Manage your energy. The problem of losing energy directly relates to the above. There is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine, and that includes you and me. Energy is a finite commodity.

4. Remember that impossible goals are draining. When you set goals that are almost impossible to accomplish, they will drain energy from you like a gas-guzzling engine. It is good to be mindful of Aesop's fable of the hare and the tortoise, where slow and steady wins the race.

5. Make sure you have the necessary support. This takes on many guises. You might not have the people support to make it happen, or you could have a lack of money or other resources.

For example, a gentleman decided he wanted to be an influencer. He came up with a message and plotted out what he was going to do in terms of writing books, producing videos and making podcasts. He created a comprehensive media plan, complete with a timeline that he was adamant about sticking to come hell or high water. The problem wasn't the hell or high water; it was the fact that he didn't communicate with the other professionals about makeable deadlines, even if they pushed themselves. He had all these grand plans and then got frustrated because even the excellent professionals he chose couldn't write four books in a month, construct several different websites, produce a 25-part video and market the entire thing with any semblance of a plan. Nor did he have the money to hire enough people to pull it off!

6. Have a measuring matrix in place. You don't know if you've arrived if you have no way of figuring out if you got there! By that I mean you don't set milestones for yourself to track where you are at in your resolution.

Let's look again at weight loss since that is such a fave and easy to understand. First, you have to decide if you are going to follow the doctor's advice and shoot for losing two pounds a week. If you do, then you know you will lose eight pounds a month and can plot your milestones accordingly. Any career goal works the same way. You need to break it down into manageable components and use it as a reference point.

You can keep resolutions or meet objectives. It does take some strategic planning, implementation, and common sense. When you ground your goals in reality and intelligently apply the work you do toward them, you will reap the rewards and avoid the frustration.

If you are interested in pivoting your life and business goals to ride out the disruption, let's connect on Linked and co-create a strategic plan for you!

Parts of the article were originally published on Forbes Coaches Council.