My Top Seven New Year's Resolutions

Are you tired of making the same old New Year's resolutions year after year? Well, here's a selection of some new ones you may not have thought of before, and some old ones too:

1. Don't make any resolutions which you have made and failed to keep in previous years. If you failed to keep them before, you'll almost certainly fail to keep them this time too. Try some new ones! (There's one exception to this -see Resolution 7 below).

2. Make a list of the things you are not going to do this year. I'm not talking about thinks like giving up smoking or drinking. I mean giving up some of the commitments you have which are taking up your time and energy. Taking too much on is one of the best ways to cripple your endeavours, so making a resolution to do less can free you up for doing those things which you really want to do (see next resolution).

3. Decide on one thing you are going to do each month during the coming year. I'm not talking about big business goals here, just things you would really like to do "sometime" but have never got round to. Perhaps a place to visit, a book to read, a person to meet, a sport to try out, whatever. Have fun drawing up your list for the full twelve months.

4. Give yourself one big goal for the year. Something you are going to aim for and achieve whatever else happens. Maybe it will be a work goal, maybe a personal goal, but it needs to be the focal point for your entire year.

5. Pretend you are yourself in exactly one year's time and write a description of the year that has just passed (i.e. 2007). Put it away in a drawer and don't look at it until this time next year. Then you can see how much of what you wrote actually happened.

6. Resolve to look back on your day each evening and identify one thing which you did well, and one thing you will do differently next time.

7. The one exception to Resolution 1 is to lose weight (only if you need to of course!). Losing weight is like Mark Twain giving up smoking: "It's easy, I've done it hundreds of times". But what would you think of a diet by which you could lose weight by eating what you like, when you like and in what quantitities you like (well, most of the time anyway) - a diet in which you could just decide how many pounds you want to lose and it would transport you there effortlessly at the rate of one pound per week. Too good to be true? Maybe, maybe not. Learn about it here.

This article is taken from the latest issue of my newsletter