Welcome to the New Year! I hope this year is filled with good news, blessings, joy, and happiness. I love the start of a new year with all of its promise and hope yet I know there have been more than a few years that fizzled pretty quickly for me. Either I broke my resolution quickly, or got bad news, or didn’t feel well or any variety of issues that can throw us off track.
Recently I heard a statistic that long term smokers who eventually quit smoking for good, on average, had tried and failed a full 12 times prior to quitting for good. Now you could ask, “What took them so long?” Or you could say, “Wow, that is true perseverance.” If you said the second, there’s a good chance that you have overcome some obstacles in your life that were really difficult to overcome.
People who fail and keep trying are usually the ones who are ready to learn from the last failure and try something different the next time. The permanent quitters (of smoking that is) had to learn something new each time they tried to quit. If they had given up the first time and said, “I tried and failed so I know that I’ll never quit smoking.” They would still be smoking today. It wasn’t so much about will power but rather the power of changing both how we look at something and the behavior that goes with it.
So what’s your resolution? Have you tried and failed in the past? Why did you fail and what do you need to do differently this time? Are you beating yourself up with each failure or are you saying, “Ok, that didn’t work. I need to try something different.” Either you need to change your mindset around the issue or you need to change the behavior around (or both). I’ve never made lasting change in my life without addressing those two issues and trust me, some of the changes took more than 12 tries!
Best of luck on any new endeavor or resolution that you make. I’d love to hear about your progress, about what you’ve learned or what you might do differently. Let me know if I can help. Here’s to a year of health and happiness for all of us!
Love,
Lisa Kaplin Psy. D. PCC