6 Ways to Make Your New Year’s Resolution Work For You

On January 8, 2022December 31, 2021 By Motivate. Innovate. Relate.In goals, Motivate, Sensory Needs, Special Needs2 Comments

The new year has begun and goal setting and resolutions are upon us. The new year offers a time of reflection and retrospection. The new year offers a fresh start and a great opportunity to create a better life for us and those around us.

According to Forbes, for 2021, the “most popular New Year’s resolutions are about self-improvement (living healthier 23% of people, getting happy 21%, losing weight 20%, exercising 7%, stopping smoking 5%, reducing drinking 2%). In addition, people resolve to meet career or job goals (16%) and improve their relationships (11%).” Of those working out falls into three of those top goals (a whopping 50%).

According to FSU News, “on average, 80% of New Year’s resolutions fail by the second week of February…it takes approximately 66 days for a habit to become automatic.”

So how do we combat this huge obstacle and make our resolution to be healthier happier people come true? Here are six steps I have taken to help me in the past and present.

Be Realistic: Do not set yourself up to fail. Be realistic in goal setting. If you have never worked out, it is highly unlikely you will work out six days a week an hour and a half. You likely won’t lose 50 lbs in three months. Set a goal that works for you. A good goal will be SMART. The more specific and measurable a goal, the better. Want more? Check out this blog on 10 goal setting steps to success

Specific.
Measurable.
Attainable.
Relevant.
Time-Bound.

Photo by Jess Bailey Designs on Pexels.com

Set a routine: The hardest part of a resolution (or any goal), is to incorporate it into your already hectic routine. By creating a routine where your goal is a part of it, you are more likely to be able to attain your goals. According to Northwestern Medicine, routines are essential to a healthy lifestyle. Routines will help reduce stress, increase sleep, give better health, and set a good example for your children.

Get accountability/work out partner: Progress is never made alone. We need each other. Find a friend or partner in your goal. This will help increase serotonin when you work out or work on your goal because you will be doing it with a friend. This friend can also help keep you accountable on days you don’t want to work toward your goals (and we all know there will be those days). Exercising with a friend is just more fun and it helps build your friendship. By including an accountability partner, you are more likely to stick to your goals and succeed. You typically work harder when someone else is around (because they are watching you) and it brings out the competitive side and spurs you on. Working out with a friend can be cheaper by splitting the cost of the trainer/equipment. Your accountability partner may have new ideas to bring. And, it just safer – you want a spotter on those weights or someone to run those trails.

Track Progress: I have said it before and will say it again. Without a way to track the progress, you can get very discouraged – especially with weight loss. Muscle weighs more than fat, so that scale may climb before it falls. Have a way to track your progress toward your goal. I like this habit tracker for my goals. But, for weight loss goals, I find tracking with a picture to be more satisfying. It shows the way the body changes over time rather than a scale that just reflects gravity.

habit-tracker Download

Eat Healthily: We all know we should eat healthily, but we typically do not. The words themselves just make it sound like salads and bland food or processed protein shakes for the rest of our lives. BORING! But, healthy food is the opposite! Eating healthy just means incorporating colors into your diet. Get away from processed foods and enjoy the great taste of vegetables and fruits. Don’t snack on chips, snack on berries. Don’t eat bread three meals a day. Replace at least two of those servings with veggies. Vegetables are so versatile you can have a different dish with a different flavor every night of the week for months. Limit the sugar and salt. Enjoy the garden God gave us. You will be surprised how good it all is!

Drink Water: This is probably the most simple and overlooked tip in getting a healthy habit started. Water is so beneficial to our bodies. It helps our bodies process every system. It helps our skin stay brighter. It helps us look younger. So, instead of that second cup of coffee, drink a glass of water. Have water before a meal, and you will eat less. Bored with water, add some flavor. I like to flavor mine with lemon, kiwi, mango, and other fruit flavors. Water doesn’t have to be boring.

Stretch: This one is often forgotten when people talk about working out. It is also often forgotten in most classes at the gym. If there is no stretch in the workout class, do one on your own. Research shows time and again, stretching is good for you. The Mayo Clinic provided stretching:

Improve your performance in physical activities
Decrease your risk of injuries
Help your joints move through their full range of motion
Enable your muscles to work most effectively

Research also shows stretching can relieve post-exercise aches and pains (we all hate day two of a workout routine), improve posture, and manage stress better. So take the time to stretch daily. This is a great way to help relax at the end of the day as well.

New Year’s Resolutions are great ways to get us towards goals. But they are only as good as the effort put in. If your goal is like half of America to live a healthier happier lifestyle, then try these six steps to ensure success.

6 Steps to the Right Balance of Independence and Growth

On July 14, 2020July 11, 2020 By Motivate. Innovate. Relate.In behavior, homeschool, Independence, life, Motivate, motivation, Special NeedsLeave a comment

"Nothing is #impossible the word itself says I'm possible." #AudreyHepburn — “Nothing is impossible the word itself says I’m possible.” – Audrey Hepburn

What do toddlers, pre-teens, and teens all have in common?

They cry out for independence. “Don’t help me!” “I can do it myself!” “I’m not your little girl/boy anymore!”

Sound familiar?

They are not wrong. Kids can do so much more that we think they can. So how do we know when to step in and when to let failure happen? How do you teach accountability and responsibility to children who think they know it all already? Here are 6 tips I use in my household.

1. Pick your battles: I hate messes. Call it a pet-peeve or OCD or what you like, but I like a clean, neat and tidy home. My siblings (sorry guys) growing up and kiddo now, have other ideas of what home should feel like. I learned early on as a parent, to pick my battles with my very strong-willed* child. Now, when the room doesn’t get cleaned, I shut the door (out of sight out of mind) and my kid knows he doesn’t get to watch TV, play video games, play outside, create anything until the chores are done. It has created a much more harmonious environment.

2. Offer Choices: When I was younger, my parents divided chores by age (ignored gender rules). Occasionally they would re-arrange as family dynamics changed. I liked this. But recently came across a “Chore Market.” (This works very similar to Silent Butler). What is that? Much like the Stock Market, a Chore Market is when your children bid on chores they will do. The catch? Lowest bid wins and that is now their allowance. This is a great way to start teaching financial responsibility, family responsibility, work ethic, and start the conversation on investments as they get older.

3. Provide Flexibility: Flexibility is a key to success. This prevents kids from thinking they must be perfect all the time. Perfection can be rehabilitating. So, teach flexibility with deadlines. One of my favorite practices in home school is offering a Fun Friday – this is a five-week school scheduled offered to be completed in four days, at their pace. We do not set days for subjects to be taught, my son gets a weekly schedule and he can finish it at his own pace. Some very motivated weeks, he does two weeks in one, and some weeks there is carry over to Fun Friday. But, he has the flexibility to finish his tasks as he needs.

Japan’s Independent Kids

4. Support Growth: This one is hard. We always want to be the protection for our kids. It is nature. Reality is – we will not always be there for our kids. We must support them. When I was five, my mom took me on a mile walk from my house to my kindergarten class. That was it. After that walk, I was on my own for getting to and from school. As my younger siblings joined, I became responsible for them as well. Different times, I know. But, really, not all that different. Teaching kids how to play in the neighborhood, get to and from school, and ultimately fail at school or chores teaches independence and that we are all human and make mistakes.

5. Encourage healthy risk: My son loves to cook! But, he is also easily distracted. But, when he asked to learn to cook his own breakfast at age seven, who was I to stop him? So, he learned (first very closely supervised) how to make his own eggs. This has now become gourmet eggs, sausage, and fruit in the morning. After six months (I could have let go of the reigns sooner), he took over his own breakfast. He knows makes all his meals except our family dinner. But he also catches our family dinner often – taking responsibility for providing for our family.

Einstein was a Failure?

6. Embrace Mistakes: We are not perfect! Your kid will be less perfect than you. Embrace the mistake. Everyone spills milk. Everyone burns a dish here and there. Everyone skips to the back of the book at least once for the answers. The trick is not to dwell on the negative and failure but to use that to encourage growth and learning. As Einstein put it so well, “Failure is success in progress.”

Our kids are miraculous beings. Our job is to help them see that – without inflating their ego. Finding a balance between independence and responsibility is hard. But possible. The more we practice these steps the easier they become. The more we encourage independence in a healthy way, the more our children will learn problem-solving, critical thinking, and fundamentals of life.

How have you found this balance? What has worked? What has failed?

RESOURCES:

*If you have a strong-willed child, like mine, I really found Parenting a Strong-Willed Child: The Clinically Proven 5 week for parents of 2 to 6-year-olds by Rex Forehand and Nicholas Long to be very insightful.

Why Dads Matter

On June 2, 2020May 30, 2020 By Motivate. Innovate. Relate.In dad, family, MotivateLeave a comment

“It is the primary task of every society to teach men how to father.”
Margret Meade, Anthropologist

Women are superheroes. Women have, and continue to, change the world. Women have been changing the world since the dawn of time. Women’s suffrage, flying across the Atlantic, serving in politics on cabinets, supreme courts, scientific revelations, and Nobel prizes and incredible sports achievements are just some of the incredible feats women have contributed to bettering the world.

It is easy to get drawn into the rhetoric that women do so much and should have equal rights (if not outright better treatment) with men.

Although I am all for women’s rights, equal pay for equal work, and representation in political fields across the world, I fear we are devaluing the very crucial role men play in developing not only society but our children.

Our children are bridges to the future. I do not believe there is anyone out there who feels there is nothing left to improve in our world. If you want a better future, we need to pour into the next generation. We need to teach them lessons from both women AND men. We need to take back the narrative for men and celebrate how very important they are. Men, dads, and those in dad-like roles offer valuable teachers to our children.

I am not saying women and mothers are not important to raising kids. We are. But in bringing attention to the value of women, we have diminished the value of men. We celebrate when a woman gets a job, she is unqualified for, over a man. We take little boys’ heroes like Thor and Iron Man and make them women. We encourage women to “wear the pants” in a relationship.

We wonder why men today and young boys can’t step up when the time is right. Don’t know how to treat a woman with respect and dignity. We wonder why little girls grow up to be in a relationship with bad and abusive men. We wonder why women have low self-esteem and self-worth.

Fathers are so essential to teaching children to grow into wonderful adults who contribute to society and the family. Science has shown involved, active fathers help have a positive impact on both the dad’s mental and physical health and the child’s ability to positively interact with society.

Recent research on the value of dad has shown some interesting correlations to the success of children. The involvement of dads in a child’s life has so many positive outcomes on the child. Positive outcomes that then affect society in positive ways. The presence of an active father changes the the world in four significant ways.

1. Less likely to be criminals: According to Dr. Kyle Pruett, a child psychiatrist and clinical professor of child psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, kids without attentive fathers are three times as likely to find themselves in the juvenile justice system before the age of 18 compared to those with involved fathers. This is echoed in Kevin and Karen Wright, in their paper Family Life and Delinquency of Crime. Children who are disciplined by both a father and a mother are better problem solvers and less aggressive resulting in decreased delinquency.

2. Do better in school: Who doesn’t want their child to do better in school except for the parents of Matilda? School is where kids learn socialization and self-worth alongside academics. A study published in Sex Roles in 2016, found that U.S. teenagers with supportive fathers had higher optimism and self-efficacy which transferred to doing better in school. These results even occurred when the father figures had little education and limited English. Daughters, in particular, performed better in math. Sons did better in language.

3. Stay at jobs longer: Commitment is a huge deal in life. Everything from an RSVP to knowing your job will be there in the morning is critical to a functioning society. It used to be, not even two generations ago, people worked for a company for forty years and retired. Now, a company is lucky to keep an employee for three years. Research is showing dads are critical to teaching commitment to their children. Involved dads tend to raise children who are more committed.

4. Less likely to gender stereotype: My dad taught me how to change a tire, mow the lawn, and install an electric switch (all traditionally male chores). He also taught me how to study, how to do laundry, and make an excellent stew. When a father is involved, children see how men and women handle situations differently. They lose the idea that only one gender should do a particular task.

It is unsurprising the value of dads in shaping our children and playing a significant role in changing our society for the better. Sometimes we just need a little reminder.

This #FathersDay let’s remember to thank Dad for all he does. Take a little extra time to think about him and maybe get him something more than a tie or new pair of socks.

Over the next few weeks, I will be focusing on some of the valuable lessons Dad’s teach us as children and showcasing some of the stories you have shared about your dads. Send me stories on how you were taught, or your spouse was taught, one of these lessons for a chance to bring some positive light on these awesome men.

Click here for more resources on fatherhood and being and becoming a better dad.

Some Where Over The Rainboots

Tag: success

6 Ways to Make Your New Year’s Resolution Work For You

6 Steps to the Right Balance of Independence and Growth

Why Dads Matter

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