The statistics around New Year's resolutions are pretty grim. In this solo episode, Valerie will take you through the tips and exercises she does with her coaching clients to ensure their resolutions are successful. You can test your New Year's resolution knowledge with our segment "2 Truths and a Lie" and also participate in the winter-themed question of the day!
The statistics around New Year's resolutions are pretty grim. In this solo episode, Valerie will take you through the tips and exercises she does with her coaching clients to ensure their resolutions are successful. You can test your New Year's resolution knowledge with our segment "2 Truths and a Lie" and also participate in the winter-themed question of the day!
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If you’re interested in private business or career coaching with Valerie, visit valeriekingmallar.com.
Speaker 1:
Welcome to Brazen, a weekly podcast where we get down and dirty on how we can live a more bold, curious and vibrant life. We are your hosts Kali Hughes, a self-care coach and nurse practitioner, and Valerie King-Mowler, a business growth and mindset coach. In this podcast, we are helping women stop people pleasing and perfectionism, awaken their inner badass and discover what can happen when we take the lead in our own life. Join us as we explore everything available to us when we brazenly take accountability for our life and well-being. Let's get started.
Speaker 2:
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Brazen podcast. Today I'm here by myself, but I'm going to use this time to talk about a topic that I've been discussing with a lot of my clients as we wrap up the year, and that is the topic of should you be setting a New Year's resolution? I'm sure everyone is pretty familiar with all of the facts around how many resolutions fail and all of that, but we are still going to play the two truths and a lie. Even though Kali's not here, you can play along from home, but here are three facts and you just need to pick out which one is a lie. The first one 9% of Americans achieve their New Year's resolutions. Number two the most popular resolutions revolve around exercising, eating well, losing weight and saving money. Number three 12% of people quit by the end of the first week. If you guessed number three, that is a lie. It's actually 23% of people quit their resolution before the end of the first week. Kind of grim statistics overall, but this isn't meant to really discourage you from using this time to set some new goals or habits for yourself.
Speaker 2:
One thing I'm going to talk about a little bit is just five ways that you can make New Year's resolutions in a way that will help you be more successful. The first one is to actually set your resolution before New Year's. It's always been weird to me that you have a whole night of potentially partying or staying up really late and then starting your resolution the next day when you're potentially hung over, really tired, on vacation, likely just maybe having a brunch. Overall, it just doesn't really work to set yourself off on the right foot. There is that dead zone between Christmas and New Year's where a lot of people aren't necessarily working or you're the end of the Christmas celebrations but you're just waiting for New Year's. That's a really great time to set your resolution and start it, knowing that you'll have a couple of days that you might go off track. But, on that note, just try to shoot for being 75% successful. It can't be something where you're like I'll be in the gym every day if you never go to the gym right now. So don't try to shoot for 100% perfection, because that will be the first thing that will trigger you to stop pursuing your goal.
Speaker 2:
The second thing is to start with a micro habit. That's really easy to do. So I just use a gym example because that's the one that everyone talks about, but if it's something that requires a lot of steps to achieve. So in the case of the gym, you have to get up early potentially, get your workout stuff together, drive to the gym and then work out. That's really far outside your potential kind of day to day life right now. So starting with something that you already do and just kind of improving on it will set you up for success. So, for example, maybe it's just not hitting snooze and getting up right away, and or maybe it's just saying five minutes of activity to start, or you know, and then kind of building up on it. So you're starting with something really tiny and then you can build up on that success and kind of keep increasing your goals. So starting with a micro habit that's easy to adopt will set you up for success.
Speaker 2:
Number three is to try something kind of new. Instead of shooting for one major goal, try doing like a 12 month habit calendar. So, for example, if you wanted to say, learn a language, start eating healthier, working out, and you had kind of a whole list of things that you are trying to achieve, you can start by just adopting one tiny habit for the month of January and then adding on a new habit in February. So then by the end of the month or end of the year you'll have 12 different habits that you've adopted, and it's a lot easier than trying to eat healthier, work out more, meditate, read more and do everything all at once. So by doing this you're kind of setting in stone one habit before you add the second one, and so on and so on.
Speaker 2:
Number four is to prepare the days ahead. So if you are dead set on setting a resolution for January 1st, making sure you're using the days leading up to kind of prep yourself and get everything you need so you're not sort of scrambling on that day, or even if you start before January 1st, just using a couple days to kind of prep yourself so that you are able to start and aren't kind of, you know, stuck in just the preparation mode and then finally try setting a goal that you are going to just try something for 30 days or 50 days or 100 days or something kind of that seems finite, so that it seems a little bit more achievable and not something where you feel kind of overwhelmed by the idea of doing something forever. Chances are, once you've done it for a while you'll either really like it and want to keep going or you'll have modified it so that you can potentially do it, a different version of it going forward. So those are five little ways that you can kind of set a more successful goal or a resolution for the new year season. But obviously you can set these at any time or try these exercises at any time.
Speaker 2:
I like to do this kind of thing on my birthday, which is actually only a few weeks before New Years, but that means I'm setting up myself for a really good New Year's Day because I've already been doing the activity for a couple of weeks. So but try doing it on your birthday or the first of the month. You can kind of set a new resolution or a new goal, but don't feel like you're stuck with a New Year's Day kind of method of setting resolutions. So that's just a quick little summary. It's things that I've worked on with clients. They've had really good success, especially with the micro habits. When it's something that's not super outside of your comfort zone, it's just like a tiny bit different than your daily activities, you can prep yourself and you get a lot of that feeling of success from just that one thing. So give it a try, let us know what you think.
Speaker 2:
And I'm going to end with a question of the day, even though Kali's not here to answer it. And the question is what do you enjoy doing during the winter? Perfect timing, because I currently set a goal for myself to do 100 days of outdoor time, a 20 minute minimum for the next 100 days. I did that because I used to be kind of someone that really liked winter and then recently, in the last couple of years, I feel like I've just hibernated the whole three months or four months of really heavy snow. So I'm doing this so that I can ensure to get myself out there.
Speaker 2:
I'd say probably the thing I like the most is kind of just anything hiking or snowshoeing or anything where I'm kind of in the woods or along the beach or anything like that. I don't ski anymore, but I probably should take that up again because that definitely adds a lot of excitement for the winter months. So that is my personal answer. Feel free to ask your friends and family and get some ideas so that you're not just hibernating through the winter and feeling like a slug for three or four months. But until next time, keep being brazen and stay tuned for more episodes. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Brazen podcast. We'd love to hear more about your parenthood or childfree journey, so please feel free to email us at hello at brazenwomencom. If you liked this episode. Please rate, review and share the episode so we can get the word out there. We'll be back here next Tuesday, but in the meantime, keep being brazen.