The Song of My Spirit 2

The Song of My Spirit

The Journey to become a Better Me: Week Two

By Kristen Debler

Statistics state that only 8% of us will keep our New Year’s resolutions within the next three weeks. Does this mean that the 8% that do keep their resolutions more driven than we are? More motivated? The answer to those questions are no. At the end of the year, we are all motivated to work on becoming better people in some way or another but we often find these resolutions hard to keep. There are two reasons behind this; most of the time we set high, hard to reach goals for ourselves and get discouraged when we cannot climb Mount Everest by February. Set reachable, obtainable goals for ourselves. For Instance, if your goal is to lose 50 lbs. Set daily goals for yourself, i.e. add more fruits and vegtables to your diet, drink 1 more glass of water a day, walk for fifteen minutes, etc. We cannot train for a marathon in one day. It takes days of sacrifice and training to get you to become a better runner. Build incentives for yourself on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. So, when you accomplish where you wanted to be at this point do something nice for yourself.

The next way that we fail ourselves in achieving goals is forgetting that life and schedules can get in the way. The goals that we have set for ourselves might not be realistic. For instance, if you tell yourself that you want to run for 90 minutes a day but you work 8 to 12 hour days and you go to school at night, that goal might not be realistic. Finding time in our schedules to achieve our goals is very important. Look through you schedule and make dates with yourself for 30 to 60 minutes a day or look for three days a week where you can make the time to exercise for 90 minutes and clear your mind.

I thought that I had hit the ground running, this first week of 2014. This week I have had a lot of success but I had some difficulty as well. For one thing, when I started the week, I was coming out of a two month break from school; which ended when I started law school on Wednesday. As I looked at my class schedule I became a little overwhelmed with all of the reading that I will have to do. I will be sitting in front of my computer, reading, more than I expected.  In my last piece, I defined my first step as defining what my weaknesses are (in regards to my weight) mentally and physically. What do I need to get rid of in my life and what do I need to work on to become a better me?  Sitting is a huge weakness for me. I already sit a lot at home and at work and can be very lazy if I want to be. If my goal is to lose weight and become more mobile, how can I accomplish this?

So, I have come up with some weaknesses and steps I can take to overcome these weaknesses, when it comes to achieving my goal of weight loss.

1. My first weakness is sitting. In order for me to lose weight I need to balance diet and exercise. In order to do this with my schedule I needed to find exercises that I can accomplish while sitting down.  I went online and googled chair exercises. I found some pretty good exercises that I can do sitting in a chair, or a work out ball at home or work. Some of these exercises really get your heart rate up but nonetheless they keep me moving even if I have to sit while doing them.
2. One of the other steps that I have taken was making dates with myself. I look for three days a week where I can find time to walk or swim for 15-30 minutes in the pool.

This week has been a success for me because I saw the problems that I was having with maintaining my goal and I decided to find time to work around them. I made my goals attainable and realistic and hopefully I will be one step closer to achieving my New Year’s goals.