National Resolutions Launch Week!

The attention on New Year’s Resolutions may not kick in for another 7 weeks, but did you know THIS WEEK is (at least as far as we’re concerned) National Resolutions Launch Week?? Indeed!

Coop – what in the world are you talking about? It’s the first week of November. My calendar points to National Donut Day (Nov 5), National Men Make Dinner Day (Nov 2), and National Sundae Day (Nov 11) but no mention of anything related to resolutions. Ahhh – Catalyst Community – maybe you need a different calendar because this might just be the most valuable week of the year when it comes to resolutions…

New Year’s Resolutions get a bad rap for being short-lived. However, the reasoning behind that failure is a function of their timing… and its relation to time. For a large percentage of the population, resolutions are created during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, when many of us are living more in the Twilight Zone than reality. Work schedules downshift for many, creating an artificial perspective on available time for boosting activity levels, creating healthy meals, tuning into our finances, spending more time with family and friends and other areas that dominate the resolutions Top 10 lists.

Then we wake up to the real world on Jan 2nd and all bets are off. We don’t have time to do any of those things! What were we thinking? Oh well – resolutions don’t work anyway. What’s the use?

But what if you woke up and discovered you had an extra 30-60 minutes of time every single day for the next several months? Would that open the door to changing up a habit or two? Absolutely – which brings us back to this week’s National Resolutions Launch celebration! You DID wake up yesterday with an extra hour available thanks to the time change. We mentioned this incredible opportunity last week in this short video. In case you missed it, here’s where things stand…

You likely woke up on your old sleep schedule the last couple of days (e.g., your old 6 AM is now 5 AM). The default response, which most people do but you’re not “most people”, is to stay up later based on your old schedule (e.g., the new 10 PM is your old 11 PM). But what if you didn’t? What if, instead, you turned this week into your Resolution Launchpad? Instead of following the default option, what if we even just split the difference? Go ahead and bump bedtime to your old 10:30 (new 9:30), making either a little AM exercise, journaling, preparing a healthy lunch, or getting some additional sleep an easy addition? Or you could go totally crazy and stay on your old schedule (old 10 PM = new 9 PM) and REALLY transform your life with the extra hour! Ok, ok – that’s probably crazy talk but just wanted to throw it out there for consideration.

Time is the number one reason we give for not enhancing our lives, for not moving toward Better Than Yesterday. This is the one week of the year that excuse falls short. We can default to what everyone else is doing (along with eating more junk food, spending more time on our phones, etc). Or we can celebrate National Resolutions Launch Week!!

It’s only Tuesday – you still have the choice… 😊