Last year, I attended a seminar on how to change your life in four days, presented by Martha Beck, a Harvard-trained sociologist and well-known life coach, to a packed house. Many people, it seems, wants to change their lives. But how many of them really knew what they wanted? One sure test is to check in with your body. “The body never lies,” said Martha, and called several people up to the stage, one by one, to demonstrate what she meant.

To establish the premise, each volunteer was asked to name their favorite food, hold out one arm firmly in front of them and say, “I like chocolate ice cream [or whatever their favorite food was].” When Martha pushed down on the extended arm, it didn’t budge. On the other hand, when she had them say, “I like to vomit,” and pressed down on the person’s arm, it dropped like a rock. She then went on to “test” various volunteers who proclaimed they wanted one thing – a career in counseling, for example – but whose unsteady arms told otherwise.

At one point in the evening, an older Indian woman in the audience became very insistent that she wanted to lose weight but simply wasn’t able to. “Are you sure you really want to lose weight?” asked Martha. “Oh yes,” said the woman, “Since I came to America to live with my daughter and her family, I have gained so much weight and I want to get rid of it.”

Martha called the woman up to the stage, and asked her to hold out her arm and say, “I like chocolate.” Her arm stayed firm. But when she said, “I want to lose weight,” her arm immediately gave way when pressed. The audience gasped audibly – it really was quite startling. “Hmmm,” said Martha, “I don’t think you really want to lose weight.”. “But I do,” said the woman, “I want to be able to play with my grandchildren.”

“Ahhh,” said Martha. “So it’s not that you want to lose weight, you want to be healthy and have energy so you can keep up with your grandchildren. Now that you’ve identified what you really want, see if the weight doesn’t start to come off.” The woman walked back to her seat looking stunned but enlightened.

The moral of the story: it’s time to reevaluate those tired old New Year’s resolutions you’ve had since the ‘90s. If there’s something you just haven’t been able to do, maybe you don’t really want to do it. Once you identify your true objective, motivation will follow. Here are some guidelines to help you stay on track through January and beyond:

Pick a date. A deadline is imperative – without one, your goal is just a dream. (That’s a large part of the motivational power of marathons or other competitive events that take place on a specific date.) A good time frame is three months, which allows enough time for significant progress but provides enough urgency to keep you from procrastinating.

Use the present tense. Express your goal in the present, not the future, visualizing yourself having already achieved it: e.g. “It is March 31, 2007 and I am earning $20,000 in monthly commissions.” The words “I am” are extremely powerful: They form a statement of intent, and the universe will respond accordingly.

Make it concrete and quantifiable. If your goal is vague or ambiguous -- “I am thin” or “I have a better work/life balance” – how will you know when you’ve achieved it? But if you say: “I work out at the gym for 45 minutes three times per week,” for example, then you have specific parameters for charting your progress.

Think small. Part of the reason New Year’s resolutions so often fall by the wayside is that they tend to be all-or-nothing: “This year, I’m going to lose those 30 lbs once and for all.” The surest route to dramatic, lasting transformation, however, is through gradual, incremental change, and studies show that we can adapt to a new habit as quickly as four days. What’s the smallest possible change you could make in your routine for the next four days?

And I do mean small. If you haven’t been to the gym in a year, don’t dive in with an intense cardio and weight-training routine that will have your muscles screaming in agony the next morning and giving up a few days later. In fact, for the first four days, you might just put on your gear, walk to the locker-room – and then walk right back out. The next four days, get out on the gym floor for 15 minutes. And so on. The key is to build up momentum with a series of small successes.

Trial and error. Did you know that an airplane traveling between two cities is on course only 5% of the time? The other 95% of the time is spent getting back on course as a result of the wind and air pressure. What if the first or second time the plane wavered from the route, the pilot got discouraged and said, “Okay, that’s it. I’m giving up, heading back.”

As long as you keep your destination in mind, it’s not important whether you get off track, only that you keep going. If going to the gym three times a week isn’t happening, you simply need to figure out where the weak link is and tweak your plan – go in the morning instead of evening, enlist a workout buddy, join a volleyball league – not chuck the entire goal.

Keep the momentum going with small steps, enjoy the process of figuring out what works and what doesn’t, and you can’t help but see progress.

Renita Kalhorn
http://www.intheflowcoaching.com