Effectively Planning and Accomplishing Your New Years Goals and Resolutions

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How do I plan and accomplish my New Year’s Resolutions?

Transcript:

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As we’re entering into the year of 2014, for a lot of people, it’s pretty common to start thinking about where you’d like to be, and goals, and areas for growth, and resolutions. Oftentimes people will concentrate on diminishing or lessening behaviors that they don’t want to do as much of.

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So maybe, I want to watch less TV in 2014, for example. Actually a better way to think about that is in terms of eliciting better behavior or different, more positive behavior is instead of diminishing negative behaviors, to actually increase positive behaviors. So instead of having a New Year’s resolution in terms of I want to not watch as much TV, maybe it’s a New Year’s resolution something to the effect of I’d like to read more books.

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In addition with that, you also want to make it as incremental as you can and as specific as you can. I’d like to read 10 more books during this year. Then you want to set yourself up to where you get some positive affirmation and positive return on your investment. So maybe after you read the first book, you treat yourself to dinner, or you reward yourself by getting a CD you like or in some way, shape, or form. Do that along the way and in turn, that reinforces this positive reinforcement behavior that you’re creating yourself, which can be really helpful in terms of actually increasing behaviors that you want to see happen and avoiding or not perpetuating negative behaviors.