At the start of the year, I wrote about why new year’s resolutions often fail. Did you manage to make yours stick?

If so, congratulations – you are ahead of many others. If not, that’s ok.

I would hesitate to say you have “failed” at this point. But if you don’t learn from what went wrong, then that would be a failure.

So what did go wrong? Did you manage to convince yourself out of your new, well-intended habit?

• “Oh it’s ok, I’ll just have this one piece of cake this time” – and then “this time” became every third and second time, until you had cake every time?
• “This next step is too difficult” – so you stopped working on your important project because you just didn’t feel like doing it?
• “I’m just so busy that I don’t have time to go to the gym this week” – and so you put your work and other commitments ahead of your own health?

Just remember that, as humans, our minds can be extremely wonderful and creative. Sometimes this can work for us and sometimes this can work against us. Change is often difficult and it can take a lot of effort to make things stick.

But the results are worth it… unless you are ok with not achieving the things you want to achieve. Learn from what didn’t work last time and try again. And if that doesn’t work, try again.

If you know what didn’t work last time, put something in place this time so that it does work. Heck, create some kind of “cost” to you if you don’t make it work, like making a friend collect $500 from you every time you fail to exercise when you said you would.

The start of the new year may have passed, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make a change now. Every week, every day, ever second represents an opportunity to make a change. What, exactly, are you waiting for?

And if you could use some extra motivation to achieve what is important to you, you may like to consider some personal coaching as an option.