How are your New Year’s resolutions going?

Here we are, nine days into 2010. If you made resolutions, are you keeping to them? If so, good for you! However, if you’ve slipped in your pursuit of a realistic goal, don’t be put off. I find that if I once deviate from the path I’ve set myself, I tend to give up and focus my energy on feeling rubbish instead of achieving.

A more useful way of looking at it is that setting a goal is deciding on a destination. Once you embark on the route towards your goal, you are making the commitment to reach it. You are not swearing never to make a mistake. You have promised yourself that, by the deadline you’ve set, you will be at the specified destination. If the journey includes a couple of false starts and a few wrong turns, that’s OK, as long as you get there on time.

You will know inside whether you are seriously committed to achieving your goal but have had a temporary lapse, or whether you’re not really serious about it and are just going through the motions of trying to achieve it. If the latter is the case, I suggest you stop pretending and ditch your goal until you’re ready really to go for it. If the former is the case, don’t be too hard on yourself, and keep at it because you’ll get there in the end.

Happy 2010 to you, however your year has started.