Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Hello and welcome to Imagine the Possibilities. My name is Skip Pogue. This is season two, Episode three, and it's titled New Year's Resolutions.
[00:00:16] Why do people set New Year's resolutions?
[00:00:19] I think one of the reasons is probably just tradition. They've done it every year, you know, the peach drops, the apple drops, whatever. And each year they've set a resolution.
[00:00:32] And so they just keep on because it's a tradition with them. I think there's some people that get caught up in the moment. You know, they probably had dinner, they're at a party, they're enjoying themselves. It comes closer and closer to the New Year's, and maybe they just, all of a sudden they're caught up in the frivolity of the whole thing and they set a New Year's resolution then. I think the idea that with a new year, you're starting with a clean slate appeals to some people. And they probably thought about their resolution well in advance and decided what they're going to make it. And those people stand a better chance, I think, of completing the resolution, of being successful with it.
[00:01:18] I'll tell you about my New Year's resolution in a bit.
[00:01:23] When we look at resolutions, the subject of the resolutions are probably health, money, relationship, hobbies, and, let's say, careers or work.
[00:01:37] When it comes to health, they're pretty easy to understand, right? Most of us think about health problems, think about things. We want better, to be healthier. What can we do? And we make a resolution about it. Money. To the best of my knowledge, everybody can use more money. And the ability to earn that money makes a good resolution.
[00:01:59] Maybe you want to make better investments, maybe you want to pay off debt, but things that revolve around money, when it comes to relationships, I think, you know, we all want to have the very best relationship we can have with our spouse, our significant other, our siblings.
[00:02:22] Maybe we want better relationships with our friends, other people. So that one is a relatively common one. And I understand it.
[00:02:34] Hobbies.
[00:02:37] We set resolutions, that we're going to start a new hobby. Sometimes we've been thinking about it. I want to do this or I want to do that. I'll give you an example. I set a resolution a long time ago. I spent a year reading everything I could read about photography and cameras and everything else because I wanted to get a new digital camera.
[00:03:03] So I finally did. I bought a new digital camera, some lenses and everything. And I took a class. And in that class, I learned something that really had to do with the photography, but it had to do it has served me throughout a lot of my life.
[00:03:17] We went out about the second or third class, went out nature, take nature pictures. And the instructor said, I want everybody to just go find a subject and take a picture of it and come back and show me the picture.
[00:03:32] I go out and I find a lone tree. Nothing's around it. Got a background, nice background. So I take a picture of it, take it back over to the instructor, and I take my digital card out, and he puts it in his laptop, and he looks at the picture and he says, that's a good picture.
[00:03:48] I'm like, a good picture. I think it's a great picture. But I don't tell him that. So he says, here's what I want you to do. I want you to go back and stand in that same spot and take that picture again. And then I want you to take one step to the left and take another picture. And I want you to do that for 10 steps to the left. Then I want you to come back to the center and go 10 steps to the right, taking a picture at each step, and then bring me the card back. And I said, okay. So I did that. And I stood behind him while he was looking at the pictures. And almost simultaneously, I saw this one picture. It was one of the pictures to the right. About the third or fourth picture I took to the right. And as soon as he saw it and I saw it, I said, that's the picture. And he said, yeah. And he went on and looked at the other ones to the right, and he said, yep, that's the picture.
[00:04:39] And I said, but I don't understand what I did.
[00:04:43] And he said, you changed your perspective.
[00:04:48] That's what I wanted you to do. Each step you took to the right changed your perspective. Your subject was still the same, but the perspective was different.
[00:04:57] And the reason I said that served me through life is there's been times that by changing my perspective on a subject or on something I wanted to do or accomplish, I was able to do it easier. So just keep that in mind. Sometimes we need to change our perspective. So hopefully that's something you can put in the back of your mind, and maybe at some point you can pull it out. So anyway, we have to think about. Resolutions are really goals, right?
[00:05:36] So there's no real difference in what we need, how we need to set them, and what we need to do with those. But we're talking about resolution. So goals or resolutions need to be reasonable, practical, obtainable, and measurable.
[00:05:54] I had said reasonable, practical and attainable. For a while. And about a week ago or so I was looking for some information in one of my file cabinets and I came across the file when I first started talking about goal setting to people.
[00:06:10] And when I looked at the document, it had reasonable, practical and obtainable on it, but it also had the word measurable under it.
[00:06:19] And when I read the rest of the documentation I'd written, I realized I had left that off.
[00:06:26] Maybe it's an age thing, I don't know. But I'd left it off. And I've said this, I don't know, a dozen times probably since I started doing podcasts. And now I realize I've left something off. Hopefully the people listen to those that didn't have it in there will listen to this one and understand that I've now corrected and it is the way it's supposed to be. Perfect. But anyway, it's just one of those things that happens when it comes to New Year's resolutions. Young people tend to create more resolutions than us older folks do. And that's understandable. They've got a bigger portion of their life ahead of them. They've got things they're still trying to. I'm retired.
[00:07:10] They've got things they're trying to accomplish in their work world.
[00:07:16] When we look at things and we set goals and stuff, we need to look at our personal, professional and spiritual life. We're not limited to just our personal life or just our professional life or just our spiritual life. We need to look at how to improve each one of those things. So those are important.
[00:07:38] Let's talk about statistics for these resolutions.
[00:07:45] One of the things I quickly discovered was that when it comes to statistics on New Year's resolutions, agreement between all the different statistics that are being done is kind of like trying to find hen's teeth. It's almost an impossibility.
[00:08:04] But here's a few examples of statistics that I was able to find.
[00:08:10] Columbia University says 75% of the people will quit or abandon their New Year's resolution before the end of January, and less than 10% of the people will complete their New Year's resolution.
[00:08:28] Baylor College of medicine is 88% of the people will fail or abandon their New Year's resolution before the end of January.
[00:08:40] In Forbes, Dr. Michelle Rosin said that only 6% of the people will complete their New Year's resolution. Now, here's the thing. I found a statistic, several that kind of did match. And that was that approximately half the people in the United States, half the adult population, creates a New Year's resolution. So if you think about half the population creates one, but only 6% of the people are going to complete it, that's not very good odds, is it? Why do people fail?
[00:09:21] One of the reasons that people fail is their resolution is not specific enough.
[00:09:29] What I mean by that is, let's take example, me, I make a resolution, I say, I want to lose weight.
[00:09:37] So in January, rest of January, I lose a pound. I'm like, whoa, I'm finished. My resolution, that's the end of January and I've already lost a pound.
[00:09:52] I'm done with it. I don't have to worry about it next 11 months. No, that's not right.
[00:10:01] My resolution should have been that I wanted to lose a specific amount of weight, say 10 pounds. So the end of January, I've still lost that one pound. February pound, March pound, I do that in October, I've lost that £10. I've also created a habit because whatever I was doing to lose a pound a month works. So maybe I look at it in October, the end of October, and I say, well, I'd like to lose 10 more pounds. So whatever I have done to create this habit, I continue on. And sure enough, in 10 more months, I lose 10 more pounds. Wasn't hard, you know, I just. Maybe I looked at nutrients more, maybe I exercise a bit more, maybe I. A combination of things. But whatever it was, it works. And by becoming a habit, it's something that I can continue on. If I needed to lose 30 or 40 pounds, I could continue on. And chances are, if I continued the same way and did whatever the habit I formed was, I'd be able to complete lose 40 pounds. And it would take me 40 months to do it. But that's okay.
[00:11:10] Another thing is, another reason we fail with our resolutions is we set unrealistic ones.
[00:11:17] We set unrealistic expectations of ourselves. And when we do that, we're just destined to fail. We've just set ourselves up for failure.
[00:11:31] Reason.
[00:11:32] Lack of motivation is a reason we made the resolution, but we're not really motivated to finish the resolution.
[00:11:42] So lack of motivation, bad timing.
[00:11:47] The timing is wrong. There's things that we shouldn't be doing.
[00:11:54] Lack of support. It's like this podcast. Brenda, my wife Brenda, supported me once I started on this podcasting journey. Several other people in the family did the same thing, but my wife supported me for two years. Took me two years to go from I got an idea, I'm going to become a podcaster, to actually creating the first podcast. And Putting it out where people could actually listen to. It took me two years. She kept motivating me. She kept supporting me through that two year period of time.
[00:12:30] That's the reason that we fail sometimes we don't have the support we need. Maybe we look at things and we, we think, okay, what happens if I do this? I don't prioritize things, right? I'm working. I'm not retired like I am, so I don't have a lot of free time. But I decide I'm going to do a podcast and I'm working eight hours. Say it takes me an hour each way. Hour for lunch, it's like 11 hours of my day's already taken up. Eight. Plus the two travel times and an hour for lunch. 11 hours of my day is taken up. I've got 13 hours left. How do I divide that up and still be able to get enough rest, spend time with the family and everything? Instead of having four hours or whatever I need to spend to record a podcast, I maybe have an hour, if that.
[00:13:25] We got to think about our priorities and stuff. Another reason we fail is we don't plan on how we can turn the resolution into a habit. How can we make something going back to losing weight, how can we make that into a habit? How can we make whatever the resolution we are that we chose, how can we make that into a habit that will not only help us finish the resolution this year, complete it, but will help us moving on?
[00:13:58] We sometimes underestimate the effort required.
[00:14:03] We may look at the resolution, we may think, oh, this is a piece of cake. And then we start working on it and realize it's not a piece of cake. It's more like moving a gravel pile from one end of your driveway to the other. It's work. And because of that, we quit the resolution.
[00:14:23] One of the biggest things I think that occurs is we fail to measure our accomplishments when it comes to the resolution. By not measuring it, we don't know where we stand on completing it. How far along are we to completing the resolution? Do we have any idea? If we don't measure, we don't feel a sense of accomplishment. And we don't know if we've got 10% of it done or 20% or 30% of where we stand. So that's really important now when it comes to goals and habits. I found, while I was looking around for stuff, I found that. And I can only talk about Android phones, but I'm sure iPhones have the same thing. There's a bunch of habit Goal trackers and habit trackers that are available now. I downloaded two of them, but I haven't looked at them yet because I actually just found this a day ago, day or day and a half ago. So I haven't started playing around with them or anything because I wanted to get the podcast done. But I downloaded two to look at. They're probably just the glance I took at them when I was downloading them. They're probably well worth it if you can find one that does exactly what you want. And based on the number I saw, there's probably one that would do pretty much what anybody wants. Just keep that in mind. I think that when it comes to New Year's resolutions and goal setting, that they're important.
[00:15:47] I think that we need to approach them with equal reserve. We need to understand we're setting something that we need to work at. And if we don't want to work at it, don't do it. Don't set that resolution, don't make that resolution, or don't make that goal. Because unless it's something ultra simple, then it's going to take some effort on our part. We're going to have to be motivated. We're going to have to do things to complete it. So just keep that in mind. Hopefully, with all the stuff I've talked about that you've got a nugget or two you can use next December 31st or this coming December 31st to set your New Year's resolution. And also you can use it to set goals in your personal, professional or spiritual life. And we need to work on each one of those. We can't work on 80% of our time and goals and everything else on our professional life and leave 10% for our spiritual life and 10% for our personal life, we've got to divide that up in such a way that we're focused on each one of them equally. Not necessarily at the exact same time, but equally over a period of time. Keep that in mind because I've said how important God is to me, and I think everybody realizes the way I talk about Brenda, how important Brenda and my family is to me. And my personal life is important. My professional life is kind of slacked off. I actually have business cards for this podcast. It made me feel like I had somewhat of a professional life. So if I divide the things up, I could probably say 20%, 40% and 40%. The 20% is this podcasting career that I have. So just keep those things in mind. It's kinda, I guess it's time for me to wind this thing down. And before I do that, I need to tell you about my goal, my New year's resolution. In 2014, I made a new year's resolution, and this was 24, so I guess it'd been 10 years at the end of this year and started 2025. So that resolution was that I wasn't going to make any more New Year's resolutions. And I haven't. I do not make New Year's resolutions anymore. And it works fine for me. I do set goals and stuff, but not on December 31st or January 1st. It's just one of those things I decided I wasn't doing anymore. So I did it. That's the way I did it, and I'm glad of it. Anyway, in closing, I want to thank you all. I want to thank everyone that takes time out of their day to listen to this podcast and just know that I appreciate it. And I hope on each one of them my goal is to help people. And I guess my little when I break that goal down would be that each person listens to this podcast will get a nugget or two that can help them with their personal, professional or spiritual life. And if it does, if it's one thing, one person, then I've accomplished what I wanted to accomplish. So just keep that in mind. I really do appreciate you listening and and taking time out of your day to do this, so thanks. I wish you much success. Remember that your future belongs to you. Only you can control it. Stay humble, be kind, love deeply, and laugh often. I hope you have a super day and I pray that God blesses you in a super way. Take care. Thanks again. God bless.
[00:19:29] Sa.
