Don't Quit Your New Year's Resolution Yet! 3 Tips To Rejuvenate Your Efforts

One of the best things about starting a new year is that it feels as though you're blessed with the opportunity to take on a completely new goal you want to accomplish. Unfortunately many lack the New Year's motivation to make these resolutions become a reality. Often these promises to oneself do not come to fruition, however there are those who are truly devoted to their mission and will make the necessary changes to be successful.

According to Details.com, 21% of all New Years resolutions deal with some type of weight-loss goal. If you are one of the many who are focusing on losing weight this year, here are a 3 important points to keep in mind to better your chances of accomplishing this often elusive goal.

Take Small Progressive Steps Every Week

This alone should be your number one focus as you start working on weight loss. From the moment you start, each week work on improving one thing about your health and fitness. For instance, maybe the first week you focus on improving the choices of drinks you consume on a daily basis. Therefore during that initial seven-day period you work on eliminating all sodas, juices, gatorades, energy drinks, and fancy flavored coffees and instead switch for water or other near 0 calorie beverage.

At the onset of your second week you can focus on preparing food at home in order to eliminate the fast food outings, restaurants, and pizza delivery you may have enjoyed far too frequently in the past. However here's a crucial point to keep in mind. Just because you start your second week does not mean you forget all the positives you accomplished during your first week.

Successfully losing weight is a cumulative process which is why each week needs to build on the other. Take all the positives you were able to start the week prior and now begin adding another habit that will be beneficial for your health and weight loss goal.

Start Exercising Regularly

Once you get clearance from your doctor don't delay to get that body moving. Exercise is the best way to not only burn excess calories from your body but also to start increasing muscle mass and energy. Actually there's a whole host of benefits to exercising consistently as you likely know so just get going.

However there's one note of caution you should always keep in mind. It's crucial you take the slow yet consistent approach when it comes to the topic of exercise. The point of exercising is not to go non-stop for one month and then quit altogether. Not only is that not the point of exercise, pushing your body that hard is likely to cause injury especially if you are not used to working out on a regular basis.

Start slow and in moderate blocks of time. For instance maybe the first week you simply walk for 45 minutes 4-5 days. The following week you increase the time a bit along with the pace of your walk. The week after you may be ready to start alternating between walking and jogging in 10 minute blocks.

After the third week of consistently sticking with an exercise routine of 4-5 times every seven days you should feel yourself getting stronger and having more energy. You may want to start changing up the routine and adding new workouts to your repertoire. There may be a variety of exercise classes taught in your area you may enjoy such as CrossFit, cycling, yoga, kickboxing, boot camp to name a handful. If you'd like to keep the workouts in the comfort of your own home, there's plenty available on YouTube or the DVD variety that you may prefer.

Point is, find exercises you like and that inspire you to want to stick with this process. Having a variety of workouts you enjoy doing will help keep boredom at bay. When you're having fun working out, it won't seem like work at all. You just have to get to that point where your thoughts and attitude towards exercise change and that only comes when you stick with this process for at least a month and find workouts you like doing.

Review and Revise Your Plan Weekly

Losing weight and getting in shape may come easily for you, or it may be one of the worst internal struggles you've ever had to deal with. Regardless of where you lie on the weight loss difficulty scale, it's important you self-reflect at the end of each week and revise your plan so you start the new week with a specific course of action.

When you take weight loss in 7-day increments, you give yourself a block of time where you can focus on specific instances that will either lead you to lose weight or gain weight. After your initial week, reflect on what went well and what may need adjusting for the upcoming 7 days.

Some questions you can ask yourself are:

1) How many times did you exercise?
2) Were your drinks healthy choices?
3) Did you prepare all your meals at home?
4) Travel lunches for work?
5) Were your snacks healthy and controlled?
6) Did you eat late at night?
7) How was the portion size at meals? Overeat?
8) How many alcohol beverages for the week? (Each serving averages about 130 calories)

Once you honestly answer these questions, you will have specific instances you can work on for the next week. Remember, successfully losing weight comes from sticking with healthy choices week after week for a prolonged period of time. Just as it takes time to build a house from the ground up, the same can be said about the weight loss process.

Don't expect to shed 75 pounds in a month because that just won't happen. But you can shed those 75 pounds in 8 months if you dedicate yourself to the process and are willing to get out of your comfort zone and try something new. Focus each week on improving your habits, exercise often and review/revise your plan and you will soon start dropping those excess pounds you want to be rid of for good.

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The Four-Part Formula to Getting More Grit

On January 10th, 2015, a first-stage rocket crashed onto a barge floating on the south Atlantic ocean.

The rocket, used to propel a second-stage craft into orbit around the Earth, was expected to free-fall back to Earth and use a complex system of thrusters to land upright on a futuristic, self-navigating, drone barge.

The rocket slightly miscalculated the landing, crashing hard onto the barge.

At anywhere from $40,000,000 to $846,000,000 a pop, rocket launches are difficult to budget for. The tens of millions of dollars it costs to conduct a low-orbit launch are hard to sell, which partially explains why the United States government-led NASA abandoned their space shuttle program in 2011.

Yet, SpaceX--the spaceflight company created by Telsa founder and PayPal co-founder Elon Musk--had imagined a way to drastically cut the cost of launching anything into space: simply make the rocket re-usable.

They constructed a rocket which could theoretically launch, release a payload, and land vertically minutes after take-off in order to be refueled and launched again at a later time, indefinitely.

Their first attempt to land the rocket at sea failed, but not enough to deter Musk and the SpaceX team. They repaired the rocket and made adjustments based on data they received from the crash, then tried the landing again. And again they failed. They tried again, and failed again.

Each attempt to safely land the first-stage rocket ended in a hard landing, leading to months of costly repairs and improvements. But each failed landing also uncovered information the team could take to improve their systems and the rocket itself.

Finally on April 8th, 2016, for their fifth attempt, SpaceX accomplished the task of launching a payload into space and landing the first-stage rocket safely on a floating barge in the middle of the ocean.

What led the team to keep trying, even after their first failed attempt? Musk himself is quoted as having said of their first flight: "If the vehicle does not become reusable, I will consider us to have failed."

They did fail, and yet they didn't give up. Why?

The answer lies in Musk and co's remarkable amount of grit. Research has shown that grit is even more important than intelligence or talent when it comes to succeeding. Even the most triumphant among us occasionally fail. What they don't do is quit.

How can you become more resilient, is grit something we can control or develop?
Just ask Angela Duckworth, a Harvard graduate and psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Duckworth specializes in the psychology of grit, she's spent the bulk of her career studying it.

On the question of whether or not grit is something you can develop, Duckworth explains in a podcast for Freakonomics.com:

"What specifically are gritty people like? What do they do when they wake up in the morning? What beliefs do gritty people walk around with in their heads? When you get to that level of specifics, you realize there's no reason why these things couldn't be taught, practiced, or learned."

What are gritty people like? There are four things Duckworth explains that make up the formulate to developing more grit:

1. Practice

Deliberate practice means learning as you go, getting feedback from your experience as well as from others.

The SpaceX team didn't attempt to land on a barge in the ocean from the get-go, they instead practiced with lighter rockets, on land first. Once they mastered that, they attempted the sea landing.
Any time they failed they merely thought of it as having had been another practice attempt.

2. Purpose

Purpose is anything you can develop an interest in over long term. Practice is useless if what you're practicing is something you don't feel purposeful about or can be highly interested in.

Of course, the word purpose gets thrown around a lot. What's important isn't that you find some natural calling, but instead find something you can readily dive deeper into the more you learn.
For SpaceX, that meant not only developing a rocket which could launch and land upright, but also meant exploring secondary and tertiary parts of the project: like a drone barge.

3. Hope

Failure is often inevitable, but if we learn to embrace failure as an opportunity to learn, improve, and then get back up again, we're more likely to succeed in future attempts.

To develop more grit you must start with hope, and learn that it's alright to fail as long as you don't give up or quit.

4. Time

The last part of the grit formula is simply time. Time to devote yourself to practice, purpose, and developing from failure.

Having something you can be highly interested in, something you can deliberately practice and readily get feedback on, something where you hope that you can succeed, are all important The key is, of course, giving yourself time to practice and learn and stay in the game.

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