365 Following Through Is My Favorite Tradition | December 2017 Sunday Week 6

Smiling Sundays-#365 December 31 The Strong Within Daily Affirmation Podcast Following Through Is My Favorite Tradition Why do we wait for a new year to begin again? Why do we wait for a certain time to be perfect…to start? What’s keeping you from going after what you want right now? No, seriously…take a moment to really think about the excuses you’ve come up with on why you can’t start right now on your dreams. I’ve seen statistics that say 80% of new years resolutions fail by February…and I can definitely attest to this since I work in a gym. It gets crazy busy in January, and with the passing of each month the crowd dwindles back to the same gang that’s always in the gym, except maybe a few new people who have decided there was no other option…except for full commitment towards their goal. So if you really think about it, new years resolutions are really only a 1 month resolution, if that even. New beginnings are exciting, but what’s more exciting is following through with your plans. And that’s probably why most of us fail in new endeavors, we focus only on the start…we get excited seeing the end result…never really seeing what it would take to commit to the plan. And I get it, change can be hard. Our new habits will feel painful or tough, especially when we focus on what we don’t like. When we do that we continually keep building up emotions that will incessantly tell us why this process sucks. Which keeps us in the dark about our lives and our goals thinking that what we go towards is too hard or that we weren’t capable of doing it…when in fact, all it was…was our thoughts and dialogue we used towards the goal. So let’s say your goal is to write a book this year, or to lose a certain amount of weight by joining a gym and going on a diet, or getting more organized with your work area and your home. What would make you think you’d ever see a goal through if you constantly complained how much you hated it? It seems like such an obvious statement, but still, we do it every time we work on the goal, and thus we create an idea in our subconscious that we really don’t want this goal. That it’s more trouble than it’s worth, and so like a snowball rolling down a large mountain…every utterance of your displeasure with the goal…you make it harder for yourself. Now people will call me unrealistic and Pollyanna saying that I’m asking them to be happy about what they’re doing all the time…and that’s exactly what I’m doing. There’s great pleasure in being challenged, there’s much excitement in being pushed to the limit asking ourselves whether we can do it or not, and there’s so much fulfillment in sticking with a goal because we’ve decided its importance was greater than not having it in our life. One mistake that people make in trying to stick with goals is thinking it’s about willpower. That I will…will my mind and body to do this thing I’ve set before myself no matter what. And that’s one way to achieve things, but that’s why we hate the goal—we don’t look beyond it, we say that it’s more about sticking to something and forget it’s about seeing the opportunity in the difficulty…not being stuck in the difficulty. I want to help pivot your thinking from willpower into being excited about the process, enjoying the work while you’re doing it, and getting lost in the moment rather than focusing on it’s not happening fast enough. Willpower is about forcing; but if you find the excitement in the goal, in being challenged, then it’s not a task or a chore…it’s a pleasurable part of life. If you look at fitness social media moguls and what they post, they don’t talk about how much they hate what they are doing, they talk about how they get up at 445 in the morning because while it may not always be enjoyable to get out of bed at that time…the pursuit of their goals excites them…and that’s why they do get out of bed. Sure, in some sense it is willpower, but it’s really about processing your pursuits differently. In my life coaching practice, It’s not that I teach people to be fake and dream only about happy things, but I teach them to pivot their dialogue with themselves and others, I teach them to think and act differently, and I ask them to see more of what they want rather than continually focusing on what they don’t want. We get more of what we focus upon, so when we focus on pain…we find more of it, when we focus on doing something because of fast results…we get the fast result of quitting because that’s easier than sticking to something. This is the conundrum of life…your environment is NOT determined from outside of you…it’s determined within you. You mold your environment by what you allow in your life. So who are the people you surround yourself with, what are the thoughts you surround yourself with, what are the words you constantly use, and what are the actions you perform day in and day out? In all of those things, they determine the environment within you…which will then sculpt and mold the environment around you. So this year, I challenge you to not wait for a new year to start a goal that’s important to you…if you want to begin them today at the beginning of the year, that’s cool…but don’t wait for things that are truly important to you. I want to challenge you to NOT be as excited about continual new beginnings…but to be more excited about new continuing’s you’ve decided that matter to you. Following through is one of the most exciting endeavors you will partake in. Today’s Personal Commitment: Instead of only writing down your new year's resolutions…write down what your follow through resolutions are. It’s nice to write down goals, but the reason we don’t achieve them has nothing to do with our ability to achieve them…it has to do with the habits we use in achieving them. Who do you have to become to make your goal a reality? What do you have to do consistently to make your goal a reality? So after you write down what you want to achieve this year, write down what you will have to do to act differently to help you follow through this time. Willpower will only take you so far, but if you find a new way of looking at your goals, if you find ways to be more excited about the opportunity in the challenge, if you find better ways to speak, think, and act towards the goal…then you will see beyond the goal. You will understand it wasn’t about achieving that one goal…it was about changing who you were…it was about instilling the habits that made you the person who always had that goal in their reach. Think about it this way. We talk about pursuing a goal…but we’re doing it backwards. If you listened to what I just said… I said we are pursuing a goal, we’re chasing a goal that’s elusive to the person we previously were. But if we wanted to make it easier on ourselves we would look at who we need to become to make this goal a natural part of who we are. So instead of pursuing goals, what if you were to pursue a better you. I know that sounds like the same thing, but it’s not. It’s about becoming the habits regardless of the goal…and what you’ll then find is that the goal will be pursuing you. Following Through Is My Favorite Tradition     Thanks for listening.  I'm sending great energy your way as we become Strong Within together, Personal Development Life Coach- Chris O'Hearn Contact info- email: [email protected]  phone:865-219-3247     Music by: - Zest by basematic (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. - I Have Often Told You Stories (guitar instrumental) by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Location: Knoxville, Tennessee USA but available worldwide