New Years Resolutions Another One Bites the Dust

It's February, the month of romantic love, the weather-related predictions of groundhog Punxsutawney Phil, and the ritual abandonment of all of our New Year's resolutions. We tried-oh, how exactly we tried. We enrolled in new gym memberships. We checked out works of Great Literature from the library. We purged our pantry of simple carbs and stocked through to wheat grass, tempeh, and kale. Yet here many of us are, a month later: still flabby, ill-read, and guiltily filching our kids Ritz Bitz snack packs and eating handfuls of Lucky Charms out of your box.

What on earth happened?

Now here's where the majority of us turn to self-flagellation, in the event we don't already feel bad enough: I'm lazy. I have no self-control. And now that I've blown it, I would as well spend all of those other year lying in bed, reading cheesy celebrity magazines and stuffing my face with Ho Ho's.

No, back up. What on earth really happened?

Most resolutions fail not because you're some spectacular brand of loser, but because the resolutions were doomed from the start. An especially common way to torpedo a resolution is by choosing something you imagine you must do but have no actual passion for doing (example: read Siddhartha after obtaining the kids to bed). Another solution to tank a resolution is to pick one because another person thinks it's a good idea. And that means you join a gym because your BFF says it's where all of the moms go after elementary school drop-off. Or your husband got a deal on a family membership. Or as you read somewhere you are more likely to exercise if you've got big money riding on the offer.

But mostly? Our resolutions bite the dust because although we have the best intentions in the world to create solid, positive changes inside our lives, we have no actual, well-articulated plan for carrying these changes out, or for handling the inevitable stumbles on the road from here to there without giving up altogether. We want to shed weight, so we make an effort to deny ourselves our favorite foods without ever addressing our beliefs about food, our fear and loathing of our bodies, or how much we may be relying on eating for comfort-so we will need to find alternative activities that bring similar joy.

We want to be more fit, so we throw ourselves at an ambitious exercise plan without considering what types of movement feel good to your bodies or truly knowing that it will require slow, small, intentional turtle steps to obtain from the body we currently have to the body we wish. We want to expand our minds, learn new things, and have fresh ideas to discuss. But instead of hearing our essential selves-what excites us to think about? What articles, authors, blog writers, podcasts, even Television shows light us up?-we dutifully make an effort to plow through some freshman lit reading set of the great classics.

Change is good. But change is hard. That's because there's an actual part of our brains whose entire job it really is to make sure we don't change anything. Call it the lizard brain, call it the amygdala, call it your social self: anything you call it, it is the part of you that seeks to safeguard you by keeping you in your comfort zone. It likes everything in the same way it is. And it will resist your attempts to do things differently near the top of its screechy little voice.

Having an idea, getting support, knowing that there will be setbacks, and taking small, intentional steps toward your targets will quiet that voice, just enough you could hear it for the frightened child it really is. There, there, it is possible to tell it. I've got this. You set off and play in the corner over there. Me, I'm going to make some awesome stuff happen. And you will. Really, truly. There's nothing magical about January 1. You have the rest of the year-heck, you've got the rest of your life-to become the person you always knew you will be.

Laura McReynolds is really a certified life coach specializing in "second acts," midlife course corrections, if you will, designed to help you dig deep, dream big, and discover the life you were meant to live. Check out her website and blog at