How to keep your resolutions?

More often, people set up some New Year Year resolutions but within the span of 30 to 60 days, they are forgotten. Motivational speaker Krishn Ramchurn and strategic consultant in fitness Dev Sujeewaon gives some tips on how to keep your resolutions.

Taking a resolution

Krishn Ramchurn states that before taking any resolutions one should follow these rules:

BELIEVE that YOU can achieve your resolution. It is easy to be side-tracked by the comments and observations of others, especially those close to you. Do you recall the bucket of crabs’ analogy, in which a crab trying to climb out of the bucket gets pulled back in by the other crabs? Believing in the cards dealt to you by life will give you conviction necessary to motivate you, and, in the words of professional speaker Les Brown, never let someone else’s opinion become our reality.
Do not make too many resolutions. If you never succeed at living up to your resolutions, start with ONE resolution, set over a period of no more than 6 months. If you are confident in your abilities and want to challenge yourself, have a maximum of five resolutions, with each running over no longer than three months. Why? It’s easier to visualise a three-month objective than a twelve-month one, and a three-month period is long enough a period to correct any failings in the actions towards your set goal. Having too many resolutions end up with your focus and energy spread on all of them, and eventually you achieve few, or none of them.
Set up a system to follow on your resolution regularly. One method is to keep a personal diary, in which you track your progress on a DAILY basis, and review the overall progress at the end of every week. From my personal experience, I advise to have a physical diary, and not log your progress on your PC, laptop or smartphone – with many applications running on these devices, it is easy to miss out on days of logging your progress. Your physical diary on your bedside table is not easily missed. Another option is to have an accountability partner, someone that you know will follow up with you once a week/fortnight on the progress of your set goals.
Have a plan. How do you go about living your resolution every week, day-in, day-out? In a week made up of 168 hours, with an average of 56 hours spent asleep, we are left with 112 hours. If you are working a 9-to-5 job, that means at least 40 hours gone at work. The remaining 128 hours are more than sufficient enough to act on our resolutions. How? Identify your chunks of time, in a week, during which you focus on only, and only your resolution(s). And stick to them religiously.
Accept that not all your resolutions will succeed, and that you will fail at some. That is part of life and how we learn. Evaluate the failures, re-assess your situation [did you set too high a goal?] and reset the resolution. Many people are so afraid of the future that they stay on the fence and do not take the required actions that could, and would lead them to their desired success.

How to improve your relations?

Krishn Ramchurn explains that no big success was achieved by one person. “It was always done by a team, a group of people. That is why, as we start the New Year, it is important we increase the number of our relations, and strengthen the existing ones which matter.” Here are four things-to-do which can help you:

a) Read How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. The tips and advice in that priceless gem of a book does work. For young professionals getting into their first year of employment, this is a must-read.

b) If you are an introvert, or have difficulty doing the first step to talk to people, take a workshop, training or one-to-one coaching on communication skills. To work on relations, you need to master your communication skills. You can also join a Toastmasters club [look up Toastmasters online, there are currently 7 clubs in Mauritius] and work at improving your communication skills.

c) Listen. And listen well. Most people prefer to talk about themselves than listen to others. God gave us one mouth and two ears for one reason. By practising your listening skills, you will earn the respect and attention of people, just by listening to them, acknowledging and following up on what they say.

d) Be yourself. Do not try to imitate other people you find charismatic, or successful. Every person on this earth is unique, including YOU. Accept that you will make mistakes the first few times you introduce yourself to strangers, but if you work on items (a) and (b), then you will start to succeed at this. People are more interested to know the real you than the fake image you try to project.

How to keep your finance resolutions?

According to Krishn Ramchurn, when it comes to finances, it is very easy to be a spendthrift. He lists the following recommendations:

You are an income earner:

1. Have at least two bank accounts, one where your salary is paid in, and another for savings. Use the first bank account for daily activities, and set up a direct debit in the first account, whereby a percentage of your money goes into the second account. This latter account does not require a debit card, and the accumulated money in it will only be used for major investments.

2. How do you go about identifying your percentage income to save? Motivational speaker Jim Rohn recommends the 70:10:10:10 rule, whereby 70% goes to your maintenance and daily activities, 10% goes to your saving, 10% goes to giving back to society, and the last 10% goes to investing in yourself. As your income grows over time, you can choose to increase the savings amount from 10% up.

3. Use cash instead of bank card as often as you can when making purchases. This is psychological: we tend to hesitate to spend a Rs1000 note, but tend to more easily swipe our bank card for Rs 1000, or more, without much thought to it.

4. Monitor your monthly expenditure over a period of at least 2-3 months: this will give you an idea on much you spend daily [for example, on bus fare, car fuel, eating out at the office canteen, buying a pack of cigarettes]. Once you have that figure, take out the equivalent in cash from your bank account, and this is your allocated budget for the month. And leave your bank cards at home when you go out. You cannot spend what you do not have.

5. Pay your utilities and major monthly expenses first. Consider having separate envelopes marked “Water”, “Phone”, “Electricity”, and so on, for your utilities, and pay them as early as possible. I am often caught with a pending telephone bill, and the delayed payment is accompanied by a penalty fee. Although this is not consequential over a month, when the same amount accumulates over a year, then it’s a whole different matter.

6. Avoid credit cards. Although credit cards are very useful, especially in this age of online purchases, a lot of people tend to accumulate credit cards. And banks also provide lots of encouragement and incentives to take more and more credit cards. To those who have a Visa Gold or Amex card, check out the yearly payment you have to make to your bank to own those cards, irrespective of whether you use them or not. And it is also very easy to max up on your credit card [by using money that is not yours], and become indebted to your bank. My advice is to have at least one credit card, and fill it up with the required credit before using it. This way, you will be able to control your credit card expenditure. Prepaid credit cards are another interesting alternative, if you want to reduce your credit card spending. If you currently have more than two credit cards, consider cutting up the ones which you use less often – not having them with you means you cannot use them.

You are a dependent [student, or stay-at-home spouse]

1. Look for the deals at supermarkets. Get the Intermart/SuperU/Jumbo flyers and scroll for the deals. Some supermarkets now give their customers “fidelity cards”, whereby you get points, or discounted prices. Look out for these as well.

2. Avoid stocking on perishable items, such a fizzy drinks, refrigerated food [think of a power cut and your entire lot of frozen food goes bad], and vegetables. When purchasing items with expiry dates, do check these – make sure that the end dates are to your liking.

3. When you visit a supermarket, make sure that you have eaten first – we tend to fill our shopping cart with a mountain of food and snacks when we are hungry, as opposed to when our stomach is full.

4. Buy your vegetables from the local market in the afternoon – the products will conserve their freshness, but with the hawkers looking to get rid of their stock and go home, prices tend to go down from 2pm onwards.

5. Use your student cards wherever you get discounted rates. Ask the shopping outlet if they have student discounts going on.

Family

Krishn highlights that this is the toughest one to apply, especially for working professionals. “We are so tired and fed up from a day’s work that, when we come home, we prefer to sit in front of the television or go online, than converse with our family members. People who matter the most to us.”

Here are six nuggets that will help overcome this, and ensure that our spouse, children and parents know that they matter to us.

a) Eat together: have at least one meal of the day together. This can be breakfast or dinner. During that meal, avoid putting the television on, and ask questions to one another [how was your day, what happened to …., how are you doing with your studies…]. Eating not only becomes social, but also strengthens the family ties, if the mood is right.

b) For your spouse: try to have at least fifteen minutes of one-to-one conversation/activity with them. If this is not possible, have at least one day of the week only for them [a Saturday or a Sunday]. That means 24 hours off your mobile phone and laptop. No work meetings, no going out with friends. Ask yourself this: when you are in trouble, who will be there for you: your football mates, your shopping girlfriends, or your spouse? If you have answered the latter, then you better show that person what they mean to you, by giving them at least one whole day in a week. This can be doing a common activity, shopping together, going for a nice meal or to the movies. It should be quality time that relaxes and invigorates both of you. And it actually will strengthen the bond between the two of you.

c) For your children: “children never do what we tell them to do, they do what they see us do”. If you are a parent to a child, put aside at least one to three hours every day to interact with them. The more time we spend with our children, the more time they get to know us, our beliefs, our ethics, our values. And the more trust there will be between parent and child. Moreover, if you have a spouse and children, then work at having a whole day with them [same as item (b) above].

d) Practise 100/0. Give, and do not expect anything in return. We want the best for the people closest to us, and by giving 100% of our energy, focus, and dedication, we only make their lives better. Do not be alarmed, because when you practise 100/0, with time it eventually becomes 100/100, as the other persons become aware that you are there for them through thin and thick, and they reciprocate.

e) Forget and forgive. People who matter the most to us can often hurt us the most. And they usually do so without realising it. Never let the shadow of pain or anger cloud your true feelings for your family. This goes out especially to children, who when they reach their teenage years, start to work at being independent, turn out rebellious and do things that everybody wished they had not done. Anthony Robbins once stated that forgiveness is a gift you give yourself. So every time you can, show yourself with the gift of forgiving others.

f) Always be the first person to say “Sorry”. If you are wrong, do not hesitate to apologise. Apologising never belittled anyone. It only shows how much we respect the other person. However, do not make this a habit, otherwise you will be repeating mistake over mistake. In the event that you clash with your family member, and both persons maintain their grounds, apologising first helps cool down the situation and opens for reasonable conversation.

Fitness

After a festive mood and eating so much, many people start hitting the gym as from January. Strategic Consultant at Lifefitness advices people to join gym and do exercises not to lose weight only but for a good health and a healthy lifestyle. He sets the following advice:

Exercise three times a week
Try cardio like walking, running, jogging, zumba for around 20 minutes
Try special classes like spinning, bolly aero or body pump
Nutrition is also important. Maintain a good diet along with exercise

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