How to Keep New Years Resolutions in July

Most people think they can make a New Years Resolution as the clock strikes midnight on New Years Eve and their life will magically change. Feeling intoxicated with the uplifting holiday spirits, resolutions roll off our tongues.

Yet, if you want to increase your personal power and escape the ranks of victim-hood through making and keeping New Years Resolutions, you need more than good intentions.

You need to leave behind forever your woe-is-me history of New Years Resolutions and begin a new history. One in which you keep resolutions in July. Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could accomplish your health New Years Resolution or your fitness New Years Resolution? Life would be dramatically different forever. Disclaimer: Let's make keeping resolutions in July as fun and light-hearted as possible. Having escaped mom's womb with a crop of grey hair, I know all too well the serious side of life inside out, and outside in.

In fact, I think it wise to include at least one humorous New Years Resolution each year. You're guaranteed a good laugh and it might change forever your history of New Years Resolutions.

I've discovered that I can still be exceptionally committed to something while not taking myself too seriously. I encourage you to consider doing the same.

Making New Years Resolutions is a tad like eating apple pie, grits, or tacos: each is done quickly, often impulsively, with expectations of satisfaction.

However, unless the baker bakes soggy, yucky, tasteless apples, or the cook burns the grits, or prepares tacos with moldy beans, many more people enjoy the results they get from eating pies, grits or tacos than making resolutions.

Making resolutions is easy; keeping resolutions six months later and beyond more difficult and challenging.

It's been estimated that a mere 20% of us find the strength to exercise more, eat healthier foods, give up or reduce smoking, or change other behaviors.

It seems as though our great intentions to keep our top ten New Years Resolutions fail. Maybe if we only made funny New Years Resolutions we'd have greater success.

How sad so few of us keep our commitments to ourselves.

How sad so many of us give up and quit, making our commitments to ourselves meaningless. When this happens over and over, we lose face with ourselves.

Our self-esteem plummets, and we have an increasingly more difficult time believing ourselves. We start believing our only history of New Years Resolutions will be a painful and disappointing one.

But there is hope. With some changes in our angles of vision, we can remedy this. We can change our history of New Years Resolutions and create a new history.

Remember: our history of New Years Resolutions is just that. A history. We can always create a new history of New Years Resolutions, one that brings great joy to our hearts.

How a New Year's Resolution I Made in 1983 and Have Kept to This Day Has Slowly, Painfully, Persistently Transformed Me from the King of Self- Destruction to the Prince of Recovery and Now The Apprentice of Joy

Flash back to New Years Day, 1983, Phoenix, AZ. Sharing an apartment with Virginia, a woman who wanted a brother-sister relationship, while I craved sex.

Hung over, groggy, feeling like shit, I dialed mom, requesting a loan for a new business. (I'm great at starting them, I suck at maintaining them). She agreed with one condition: I needed to promise her I'd never use drugs again.

Stunned, surprised, uncertain what to do, I remembered I had recently driven her to the San Francisco Airport, smoking a joint and extolling dope's virtues: marijuana, mescaline, acid, hashish, and amphetamines were close cousins (in fact, much closer than my blood relations).

Daily I'd roll out of bed and before my feet hit the floor, I'd be inhaling a joint. Could I possibly ever live without drugs?

I told mom I'd get back to her with my decision.

On that New Years day so long ago, I began looking at my life, how I was living, the results I was getting, and how much love surrounded me.

It was a pretty bleak picture when I faced it honestly, looked at it squarely, and didn't run away from those truths and the reality of my life.

I dialed her number, hands trembling slightly.

"Mom, I promise never to use marijuana or any other drugs the rest of my life."

That promise was the beginning of transforming my history of New Years Resolutions. I now have a much brighter picture than I did in 1983.

Flash Forward. As of November 2005, I've been drug-free these twenty-two years. I also stopped consuming alcohol in November 1983, as well as giving up gambling and seven years later, bulimia.

I had a strong commitment, i.e., the promise to my mom. Could it be that people who quit their resolutions don't really have as strong a commitment as is needed to succeed?

Or could it be that it takes more than a strong commitment if emotional wounds from the past haven't been healed?

To further explore ths issue of emotional wounds and commitment, and to read about 11 Important Considerations in Making New Years Resolutions and Keeping Them In July, please visit my web site.