It’s New Year’s Day and we know what that means! For many, it means “battening down” plans to achieve those new (or not so new) New Year’s resolutions. I use the term batten down figuratively from the image I get when thinking about the often difficult challenge of keeping resolutions. I liken the effort to being on a small boat, tossed about on a deep, dark sea of struggle. Where’s the Dramamine!
Frankly, for many of us, resolutions are easy to make but difficult to keep. One source reports that only about 12% of resolution makers keep their resolutions. Why? One possible reason for the low success rate is that the focus of resolutions tends to associate with long-standing habit or compulsion. Examples of habits or compulsions include overeating, overspending, overdrinking, smoking, physical inactivity, and excessive worry. As it relates to resolutions, we want to eat less, spend less, stop smoking, join a gym (and go to the gym), and worry less.
Despite disheartening statistics, what they fail to account for are complicating factors in resolution-making and keeping. Step 1, making the resolution, is easy. Step 2, working towards achieving the resolution, is harder. Why? Well, it’s complicated! For each of us there are a multitude of factors to consider when looking for the root cause of a particular habit or compulsion. Root cause can lie in childhood experience or from other painful memories stored deep within our subconscious mind, hidden from logical understanding. Both can affect our motivation to act and serve as barriers to change.
As an outcome or effect of root cause, there is another factor that might prove fairly consistent in our failure to keep resolutions. That factor is procrastination. Procrastination can affect our ability to follow through on resolution actions. We simply don’t get around to doing what’s necessary to positively effect change. I’ll do it tomorrow, I have to clean the house first, I don’t have the money, I’m too tired…etc., etc. Our fears and concerns, founded, or not, get in the way. Sound familiar? I know I have ridden the procrastination train before!
So what can be done to manage “procrastination stagnation” and its undesirable effects? Happily, eliminating or reducing procrastination can have dramatic effect on achieving resolution goals. One complementary modality, Emotional Freedom Techniques® (EFT), has proven effective in working to relieve the root cause associated with procrastination. Whether fear of failure, perfectionism, low self-esteem, guilt, or shame, EFT can assist to relieve or diminish root cause, thereby eliminating or reducing procrastination.
Contact Linda for additional information about EFT or other complementary healing modalities.
Cheers to achieving your goals in 2011!
“Procrastination is one of the most common and deadliest of diseases and its toll on success and happiness is heavy.” ~ Wayne Dyer
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