You Say You Want A Resolution?

'Tis the season for resolutions at year's end. Which, if you are like me, have already been broken and stomped into the dust by mid-February.

This year, though?  I'm vowing to do things differently.  And as I said last week, I'd love it if you all joined in as well because I think there is definite strength in numbers on something like this.

I've been working on an actual, definable plan, with realistic goals that can be worked toward on a week by week basis instead of coming up with meaningless, blobby goals that only sound good in the abstract.  It's the difference between:

"lose some weight"

and

"lose at least 1 pound per week through exercise -- 5 days per week at a minimum -- and following a diet plan that is akin to South Beach diet's good carbs in moderation/healthy proteins/lots of veggies and Clean Eating and Eating For Life's healthier lifestyle choices at every meal, until I reach my goal weight of 140 pounds,"

which is to say there is a huge difference in planning, accountability and execution.  I'm including a requirement for blocking off time each week for meal planning, for going over what worked and what didn't, and for planning my workouts as well.

Because for me?  Having a roadmap to success makes the whole thing easier.  But forcing myself to be accountable for following it?  Makes a world of difference.

To that end, I'm working on some charts for me to track my progress and make sure I'm following up on this every single day.  I get off track when things go wonky and especially when I haven't planned ahead for how to deal with bumps in the road.  Usually, if I have a bad day, illness, crazy schedule, etc.?  Suddenly I'm off to the snack bar.

I am not going to get derailed by emotional eating this time around if it can be helped.

Ditto for my writing goals.  Instead of "finish my novel" it will be "write two pages at a minimum every single day before you go to bed."  Period.  End of story.  I'll either do the writing, or I won't get sleep until I do -- it is that important to me to make myself stop chickening out on this.

Ditto for ending our household clutter.   And being better about time management (instead of allowing the internet to become an enormous time sinkhole on a day to day basis).  And so on and so forth.

We all have some area of our lives -- if not several -- which isn't quite what we'd like it to be.  I know I have several that I'm hoping to work on, day by day, in the coming year.  And I'm sure some of you do, too.

So this is my proposal:  let's take some time the next few days and come up with our own definable, measurable goals.  We'll get them in writing, share with each other, and then every Wednesday we can check in here all year long and see how everyone is doing.  We'll have a "Club Resolution" virtual meeting where we can talk about what is going well, what isn't work, and help each other over the bumps in the road when they come up -- and they will come up, they always do.

But this time?  We'll have someone to help us over them, together, and I think that might make a huge difference over the course of the year.  Success in isolation is never as fun as success with a group of friends who share it with us, now is it? 

And in between times?  I'll share what is and isn't working for me along the way, recipes on what we are eating that we like, how I'm tweaking my day to day existence, etc., and I'd love it if you do the same.

I'm excited about this because I'm not only going to be accountable to myself, I'll be accountable to all of you as well which is a huge deal for me -- I've always been driven by a need to exceed other people's expectations.  Usually that results in my doing things for other people which wear me out but don't give me a huge benefit other than getting the "atta boy" at the end.  This time, I think I've found a way to make that internal insecurity work in my own favor, eh?

So what do you think?  Who is in on this little "Feel Better, Be Better, Live Better" experiment?  Raise your virtual hands in the comments, please!

YouTube -- Beatles, "Revolution."  Because who doesn't love The Beatles?