Way More Important Than New Years Resolutions

Ok, this article is going to be a little more serious than normal.

We have some really important work to do.

It's important not to get to emotional about this or to moralize it.

We just need to be strategic.

It's time to review 2008

Get out all of your food journals.

Get out all of your workout logs.

Get your measurements from the beginning of 2008, and your measurements now.

Take a look at your strength and fitness gains in 2008.

Lets see what worked and what didn't.

Let's get real about what we accomplished and didn't accomplish.

If You Didn't Get the Results You Wanted

Look, if you gained 10lbs this year, you're not a bad person.  It doesn't help at all to make yourself feel bad or run yourself down.

It's just a really bad result.  Bad results come from strategies that don't work.

The smartest thing we can do is to take stock of which strategies didn't work, and stop doing them.

For awesome results, you're going to need awesome strategies.

If your strategy is just "to have more willpower this year", you are destined to fail.

Most New Years Resolutions fail because they live and die on your willpower – your ability to motivate yourself and inspire yourself purely internally.

If you rely on willpower, your willpower will run out.If you rely on your inspiration and motivation, motivation comes and goes, and inspiration fades.

If you rely on the excitement of a new year, that excitement last about two weeks.

A powerful strategy is to have structure to keep you going when the inspiration and excitement fails you:

• Accountability

• Workout partner(s)

• Maintaining a public workout-journal-blog

• Joining a workout community

• Taking on a fitness challenge. 

You need structure to keep you going long after the inspiration and motivation run out.  You need the accountability to keep you going after your willpower has failed.

Your structures and accountabilities will keep you going. 

If your strategy was "I'll make up my own workout", that's a terrible strategy.

If you are a black belt in martial arts, go ahead and make up your own martial arts curriculum.  But if you are a white belt, you go get yourself a teacher.

By the same token, if you don't have the body you want, or you haven't trained hundreds of people to get the body they want, then you actually don't have any idea what works or what doesn't work.

Follow someone else's program until you get results.  Then you can play around with your own stuff.

A powerful strategy looks like this: "I'm going to use a program that's proven to work and follow it exactly."

Another thing to keep in mind:  One of the most dangerous things a person can tell themselves is "I already know that".  If you know what to do, but you aren't doing it, then it makes no difference.

If your strategy is "I'll just try to eat better", and you don't keep a food journal, you aren't going to have enough information or structure to succeed.

If you just "try" you will fail.

You need structure and planning.

An awesome strategy is:  "I'll keep a food journal and know exactly what I'm putting in to my body.  I'm going to know if I'm treating my body like a million dollar racehorse…   or if I'm treating my body like a garbage disposal."

  

If You Are Getting the Results You Want

Now it's important to do two things:

1.) Celebrate!  Reward yourself.  Buy yourself a new outfit that shows off your new body.  Do something you might not have had the fitness level to do last year, like climb a 14er or learn to breakdance.  Just do something to really enjoy everything you've accomplished.

2.) Take note of what it was you did that worked.  If you know what worked, you can replicate it over and over again.  You can also use this as a reality check if you ever slip off your game.  You can ask, "What did I do that worked?  Oh yeah, I can do that again." 

You can also use knowing what worked to

trim away the things that didn't make a difference.  The biggest reason my clients get good results with very little time in the gym is because we cut out anything that doesn't make a difference.  Anything that is time consuming and doesn't yield results gets axed.

Before You Get Caught Up in Creating Next Year

It's ultra important to get real about last year.

The one thing we MUST NOT DO is make the same mistakes again.

Most people make the same New Years Resolutions over and over again because they make the same mistakes over and over again.

Most people don't look at what worked, and what didn't work.

Most people just beat themselves up and feel bad –
THIS IS DODGING RESPONSIBILITY.

Responsibility is looking at what didn't work and changing it.

Beating yourself up and feeling bad is how people avoid confronting what strategies didn't work. 

Beating yourself up and feeling bad is how we dodge getting real work of creating new strategies and implementing them.

If you didn't get what you wanted, you used a strategy that sucked. 

In fact, most people start with strategies that could never work in a million years.  Like not having any strategy at all, or just relying on willpower, excitement, and inspiration.

Don't get emotional.  Just deal with the strategy.

Have the courage to change your strategies and do something new.

Have the courage to say, "I don't know" and get a program that works.

Have the courage to say, "I can't do it on my own" and start organizing workout buddies or groups of friends to do this with. 

Joy, Freedom, Fun, Confidence, Excitement and Looking Way Hotter Than Last Year – Getting Everything You Want

It's not as complicated as we'd like to make it.

You already know what all the obstacles are, because you hit them already.

Some of them you found ways around already.

Some of them we keep running into.  Don't run into the same ones as last year again.

Make a new plan.

Create some new structures.

Get some new results!

The Stubborn Seven Pounds, the perfect get-lean-and-hot-for-the-New-Year workout program, is still on SALE for a couple more days:

Fat Loss Workouts Holiday Sale

By Josh Hillis

"I've seen more results in 6 weeks training with Josh than I saw in the previous two years working out on my own" -Stephanie Weis

Josh has been featured in USA Today and The Denver Post.

© Joshua Hillis 2008