Happy New Year! Now Don't Blow It!

As the new year approached, I wrote quite a bit about setting goals, maintaining goals, accountability to your goals. I even let you in on my goals for 2011.

It's the 3rd day of the new year, and I blew it already....

There were simply too many forms of cheese - my weakness food - at the last holiday gathering this weekend.

I haven't put on my running shoes in forever...

I didn't get out of bed early to write like I said I was going to.

I gained ten pounds over the holidays - NOW the goal to lose ten has doubled...

I just can't do it.

I didn't really think I was going to accomplish those goals.

What a joke.

Sound familiar? This is the voice in my head when things don't quite go as perfectly as planned. I can say a lot more meaner things too, these are just the words fit to print. Do you have a voice like this?

You can tell that voice to go away now - it's time has come. You will succeed in your goals this year. You may not succeed as perfectly as you expected last week, but you will succeed. It's a matter of altering your expectations for success.

You don't have to do it perfectly. You can make mistakes, you can even back-slide or regress. It's not a failure until you give up.

I WILL miss a few training runs before I get to the starting line in May. But the goal isn't to have a perfect training season, it's to finish.

I will succumb to the intoxicating effects of cheese a few more times - it won't be healthy, nor will it be pretty, but I can get back on the wagon.

I will stall until the last minute to write my weekly article, I may not even feel like doing it, but it WILL get done - just not perfectly.

You don't have to be perfect in the process of achieving your goal. You just have to work at it. You can fail as many times as you like. Each failure can be as long as you like - a day, a week, longer - but you can also pick yourself back up after each "failure" to get back on track.

Happy New Year - have a successful, happy, healthy, productive, wonderful, and blessed 2011.