Revolving New Year’s Resolutions
JED WIGHTMAN PERFORMANCE/SPORTS NUTRITIONIST ADVANTAGE FITNESS LTD
This article has been written for Canadian Physique Alliance – Jan/Feb 2023 Edition
Hello friends, our clients, athletes, and newsletter subscribers, Happy New Year 2023 to our growing AF Ohana. It is such a privilege to write for the greatest competitive organization in Canada, The Canadian Physique Alliance, now in my third year, and article # 17. With each article I write, I feel such appreciation from all of you who are spending your time reading my words today. I am grateful and thankful for all your questions, feedback, and your comments regarding each edition. Most recently article #16 “Lean Machine”. For those of you who have not read it, head over and subscribe to our newsletter, at the Canadian Physique Alliance. Where you will find absolutely awesome content and amazing articles from our other contributors, you don’t want to miss. Also, head over and subscribe to my AF newsletter on my website.
Holy CRAP! Here we are another year has passed with blinding speed.
Is it just me? Or does it feel to you also like last year, was just yesterday? A year ago, I was writing the January February 2022 edition for the newsletter, and BAM here we are a year later. It’s true what we are told when we are young, time only goes faster the older we get. Time goes faster? Dare I say no it does not, we simply get older, and our life becomes filled with more tasks, responsibilities, and overall, just more moving parts. Making the time that we have so much more constrained. Do you Remember vividly when you had the last month before school is out for the summer? I do, how long that that last month took, like molasses in the winter. Compared to now a month feels like honey in the hot sun, we are just so busy. I go to sleep when I wake up and it’s a year later, or so it feels.
As I write this for January 2023, I can’t help but think of the Steve Miller song “fly like an Eagle”. Not only because it’s a great song, a classic song, but because of the chorus, “Time keeps on slipping, slipping into the future”. Really summarizes what I was digging into the introduction. It seems a common theme in our culture, time, not having enough, it’s slipping away, always trying to make up for its loss. Now, we know deep down we can’t save it, and like with anything that we can’t save it’s even more valuable more important, and special. Like a blessing and a gift. The most valuable thing we have in our human journey is time, and we have no control over its passing. However, conscious of it, or not, we are deeply involved and woven into how we spend minutes, hours, days and the months becoming years that pass. So, we must be conscious of how we utilize it, some would say use but I like to utilize, utilize has a purpose in its meaning, when I think of the word “use” in this context, it feels taken for granted, something we should never do with the time, that we are blessed with each day.
So, friends, as we come to the close of another year, seemingly one has gone by even quicker than, each before. I have two main questions to ask you all, and several that follow for you to ponder today. Did or do you make New Year’s resolutions? If so, are they magnificent, life-altering, life-changing, grandiose plans? Like goals or standards that you have not yet reached. Like quitting a vice once and for all. Getting in shape, eating better, healthier, and more discipline for health and wellness, or finally stepping on stage, or not deviating, or sabotaging yourself on prep this time. Feeling better with finances, finally saving for the future, investing. Or perhaps taking yourself out of a bad situation in life, relationship or work environment that hurts you not helps you. Again, to my two main questions, do you make New Year’s resolutions, and if so, are they intended to change a major, and very important part of your life that you are not happy with? OK think about that for a minute take a pause.
Now you’ve thought about it, and if you’re one to make such resolutions on New Year’s. Do you know where they are going to be in a month’s time? Will you be crushing them or will they have faded and be put in the warehouse to start next January? If so now, here today, What’s stopping you, from making daily micro-adjustments, and corrections to living better? What has stopped you on all of the 364 days before January 1?
When, all you have to do, you just have to start right? Right now! DO IT!
Instead of Making January 1 this day of all or nothing. This is a largely flawed strategy when making changes that produce necessary and essential corrective, disciplined actions. I’m not saying that I’ve never been a planner of New Year’s resolutions earlier in my life. As a matter of fact, I have set forth New Year’s resolutions, as a much younger man, many times. Started a few, but did not follow through, not with one, consistently. I found that with each from inception, until, incompletion was revolving. Yep each incomplete resolution took the right back to where I started. My personal experience, and experiences that I have been privy to with many hundreds of New Year’s resolution-prone clients, over my 20-year career. Has been exactly that revolving.
Ok, you may say you make New Year’s resolutions and they’re successful. I’m not saying that’s impossible, nor will I argue about that. It’s for you to do some deep reflection on. So, to those select few that are capable of making life-changing New Year’s resolutions in one day and sticking to them. Power to you! I’m thoroughly impressed. However, to us mere mortals, I’m speaking to us primarily. For us to fall short soon after beginning, how long do they last? Do you talk a big game, telling yourself your spouse, and your friends all of the things that you’re going to do to correct your course? Then 1 January goes by and… you were too hungover or busy busy, “I’ll start tomorrow, for sure”, or “I was sick, hung over for New Year’s Eve, tired”. Lots of excuses can roll around, can’t they?
Or did you get a couple of days or weeks deep before the “turnstile of daily discipline lacking intentions, brought you back to the beginning of why you started? Ultimately do you believe New Year’s resolutions work?
New Year’s Resolutions
So, paying credit again, if you are a person that makes New Year’s resolutions, sticks to them corrects course and produces ample return on your investment of time, effort, and energy. You must be living, an incredible life of dedication, discipline, and formative, action, producing a year-by-year, higher standard, and I applaud you, my congratulations and my respect. For you you are a rare human being, I wonder a mere mortal? I say that with my tongue in my cheek. Nevertheless, you are like some I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting. However, I have had the pleasure of meeting a select few, who treat each day, as a new day of nuanced micro resolutions. In their habits lifestyle, and behaviour patterns. Directing their course daily, living right to the design of their ultimate vision of health, happiness, prosperity and well-being. Think on that a little, we’ll come back to it.
For the rest of us out there, myself included as I mentioned, above, I’ll tell you straight. NO, New Year’s resolutions do not work. It is a scenario of excuses and self-manipulation by which we use, to console ourselves on why we have not done this life-changing thing(s), yet. New Year’s resolutions are built with exit strategies, reserve shoots, and pink cards to each and every construct, the “resolution” represents. It is a failure-based, self-fulfilling prophecy from the outside. If you disagree or don’t believe me, just ask your friends and family, equally to reflect on their own “New Year’s resolution” of current times, or years past. See how many of those resolutions were streamlined and successful, which came to fruition. Levy this against all of them, and recognize that they are all revolving resolutions. Very much like the turnstile a merry-go-round, a centrifuge of good intention, yet with no follow-through to completion.
New Year’s resolutions are a way of insulating ourselves to protect the same habits and behavioural patterns that got us to the place where we needed to make resolutions to change our circumstances, in the first place. Friends our circumstances are largely self-created and chosen, little by little, day by day month by month, they compound. I understand that they may be painful, tragic, and terribly difficult, and some of us have a multitude to unpack. However, what is not, painful, Tragic or difficult, is that we have the ability to initiate change minute by minute hour by hour, this perspective is actually the beginning of our past freedom from the multitude, we have amassed over our life. Daily, we have the power to influence a correction to our circumstances, if need be, hour by hour. Yes, that’s right friends here today right now. HOW!? Simple, it is merely CHOICE. Just like we have chosen to continue not change or alter our lifestyle, habit and behaviour patterns, as they compound and concentrate minute by minute hour by hour, month by month year by year. We choose that path every day we wake up, or every night we wake up, depending on our schedule. We choose how we spend our time; we cannot save. We choose how to fill our lives with the things that will hurt us, or the inverse, that will heal us.
New Year’s resolutions, are, BS. They are built to fail for the sheer fact that we need to make them in the first place, insurers their epic failure. It’s far too much for us to take on in one day of appropriation, to correct everything in one year. Correcting courses is a lifelong journey. I believe if we were living right, and that simply means to the best of our ability for a healthy mind, body spirit, life situation, and overarching, we would not even consider the scenario of a New Year’s resolution. Taking a year or years or a lifetime of mismanaged time, self-destructive, poor lifestyle, habit, behaviours, relationships with others, or ourselves, and putting them into focus on that January 1 start date, as magnificent a plan as that may seem, is an escape hatch dominant societal construct, of overwhelming weight. I repeat, if we make micro-adjustments, nuanced, resolutions, daily. If we are living right for our best selves family and life, we are conscious, not led by ego, pain or trauma. We have the potential to see that each day we rise, Given the gift of life, is a day of change. We must apply, conscious, disciplined, formative, action, to create the Change. Yes, I know, very difficult most say. Yet, so simple, remember friends merely, a choice.
If we choose to change daily. Change means healing, development, and education, all being directed by our discipline of self. Then our lifestyle, habits behaviour patterns, and all of the things that I mentioned above are consciously being corrected and directed, minute by minute hour by hour day by day month by month, YEAR BY YEAR. Wow! then of course you’re upon year like we are now, and we look back over the course of the last 11 months and we see what a deeply powerful impact we’ve had on our mind, body spirit, family, friends, our world. We are on course, and if we veer off, we have the ability to write ourselves immediately. My friends as long as we do not quit on ourselves and our resolve to change, we are on course and going in the right direction. To quote, Nietzsche, “that which does not kill us, makes us stronger”, I agree with that statement, but the caveat is how we deal with surviving is what truly makes the difference. I will add “that which does not heal us, ultimately hurts us, so we must remove it.
I’m making these micro corrections and daily resolutions, we become so thorough It is subconscious and then to appoint we don’t let those things come back into our life. Friends we are in charge of our mind, body and spirit, health and success. We are in charge of our finances, and our relationships. Our career, we hold the keys to it all. Friends this is a day-by-day conscious recognition of what we need, must, and will do to live, right.
So, circling back to each of you who are successful at creating sustainable lasting change by making New Year’s resolutions. It may be that you are conscious of making corrections to the nuances of your life daily, weekly, and monthly, so when you set the New Year’s resolution, it’s not all or nothing, end all be all. It’s very possible that your New Year’s resolution is just another day of micro resolution, and without knowing it you may be like some of the amazing examples that I’ve known in the past. I have been so fortunate to have had their teaching and mentoring. The examples they’ve lived and what they taught, how to apply an effective strategy to correct the habits and behavioural patterns, to facilitate a healthy life journey. From what I’ve learned, I am able to teach this to others while living the example. Alas, a lifelong learning process for me, one that I readdress every night as I analyze my day, how I can wake up the next to better apply myself to my purpose on my journey. Not all at once remember, but piece by piece little by little, micro corrections, to then see the fruition of our efforts as we come upon this next, New Year’s Eve. So, friends here’s to being proactive, not reactive, conscious and focused on our best selves, every day. Our life is truly in our hands, what we choose, we become every day.
So, I trust this leaves all of you with much to think about, had provided encouragement and insight, a helping hand intended, or a very least some entertainment, and some insight.
Don’t miss the next edition, article number #18. We are going to dig into some real nerdy science stuff regarding nutrition, supplementation, health, and performance.
Thank you for your time reading and subscribing, sending questions, and feedback. It is from much of that that I draw my inspiration for each article. To each and every one of our AF OHANA, and all our readers.
FORWARD FORWARD, ALWAYS FORWARD.
Happy New Year!
