It is that time of the year again, when we feel that we need to start a new chapter and live differently. Yes! The New Year is here and most of us are familiar with New Year’s resolutions, where we naively imagine that the arrival of a new year will magically give us the motivation, catalyst, and persistence we need to transform ourselves.

May be you are resolving to be more active in office meetings, to leave your dead-end job, end the bad relationship that is taking you nowhere, start your own business, quit smoking, save more…the list is endless. However, the bitter truth is that change is hard. I do not mean to be the prophet of doom to your new found zeal; it is just that I have to tell it to like it really is.

Most of us can related well with this vicious cycle: You are all jazzed and motivated in January with great plans and goals for the new year only to find yourself a few weeks later demotivated and totally derailed. Eventually, you lose the zeal and return back to your comfort zone and/or old habits, thus you never attain your full potential despite your best intentions.

Does that sound like you? Trust me you are not the only one. Research indicates about half of world population makes New Year’s resolutions, and only less than 10% achieves them.

Well, am here to save you from the agony of setting yourself up for failure by planning huge and radical changes in your life that you will never achieve. This is the reason why am presenting with 10 reasons you should avoid new year’s resolutions but instead focus on progressive personal growth which will impact positively all aspects of your lives all year round.

1. Do what you love and Follow Your Passion

I know you have heard this like a million times and already has become such a cliché. However, the reason why you have heard it so many times is that because it works and also probably the reason why you are leading a miserable life is that you might have ignored this fact.

Yes we all have bills to pay and sometimes we have to do what we have to do to survive that we barely have time to think of what we love doing. Am not telling you to go ahead and submit your resignation letter tomorrow, but if you are in a job that you do not love, start planning to leave the job early enough otherwise it will be like jumping off the frying pan into the real fire. This also applies in other aspects of life.

This can involve, acquiring new skills that will get you the job you want, or even networking more to set yourself up for more opportunities. The bottom line is Follow your own way and avoid following the crowd and you will attain success. Chase your dreams and vision to the greatest depths and heights; they will surely bring you success.

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2. Learn from failure stories as well

We all love a happy ending or rather a success story and then imagine ourselves being in that position – I am as well very guilty of this. We tend to look for mentors who have attained great success, but have little time for us. Sometimes I wonder whether people think that success is contagious; am really not sure about that.

We tend to focus only on the success stories and forget that failure stories have a bigger lesson to teach. Understand why they failed and learn from it. You can as well learn from your own failures.

3. Be Ambitious but also plan

The reasons why our new year’s resolutions miserably fail is that we are all ambitious but lack a plan. What creates lasting change is less about the willpower and more on by creating smart, effective goals. Ambition and planning go hand in hand, you need to think big but also plan on the small scale dividing the into smaller portions.

4. Be creative

When was the last time you were creative about anything? Do you do everything just like the rest of the people? Do you zombie to and from your dead end job just like everybody, and wait for that merger salary at the end of the month? This is just an example of how we accept the status quo in our lives, and never push our boundaries. It is important to remember that Creativity does not always come naturally; it is a conscious effort to be innovative, different and better.

5. Read self-help books

Be your own therapist, you know your own problems and weaknesses better than anyone else. You can effectively fix them by conditioning you mind to the right state though reading self-help Books such as The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, The Power of Now-Echkart Tolle, Outliers among others, which will condition your mind towards growth.

6. Create powerful habits.

We are habit forming creatures; habits bring order in our lives enabling us to do things easily or rather automatically without much effort. In fact, our character and personalities are largely defined by our habits.

With that said, it is important to choose our habits carefully, because once we get hooked on them, it is very hard to change them. Thus, it is important for you to create powerful positive habits such as, hard work, commitment, compassion, emotional intelligence etc. which will magically multiply personal success.

I do not have to spell it to you where the negative habits will lead you…I will just name a few anyway, broken families, broken relationships, prison, low self-worth…

7. Cultivate emotional intelligence

Trust me it is not as complicated as it sounds. Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize and understand your emotions and how they affect you and those around you. If you master this secret weapon, you will have achieved leaps and bounds in terms of personal growth and career success. Magically, you will notice that, you are becoming a better negotiator, a better leader, a growing career and you have a more fulfilling social circle. You can control the rest of the world if you can master how to control and use your emotions effectively.

8. Pursue an interesting hobby

It will not only improve your quality of life by also fast track your career. Pursuing your hobbies can be compared to adding salt to salt less food. In other words, it spices up your life and gives it more meaning. Most people live in boring loops, eat, work, sleep repeat…excessive drinking of alcohol or partying hard, womanizing etc, is not a hobby; it is just a bad habit!

9. Continually improve your life

You need to adopt an attitude to progressively make positive change in your life and life-long learning. Thus, waiting for the New Year to make drastic changes in your life is such a bad idea; effective change is achieved progressively with time and not drastically.

10. Love yourself

This is a very wide topic, I can go all day talking about things you can do to love yourself and I will not be even halfway through. The point is you need to make changes in your life that makes you the person you would want to be. It is a matter of holistic personal growth that that includes, boosting your confidence and self-esteem, putting your health, emotions and family first. For instance, if you do not like the fact that you are overweight, then do something about it or if you want a job that requires some skills, then go ahead and learn them.

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As previously stated; am here to save you from the agony of setting yourself up for failure by planning huge and radical changes in your life that you will never achieve. This is the reason why I have presented you with 10 reasons you should avoid New Year’s resolutions but instead focus on progressive personal growth which will impact positively all aspects of your lives.

The above list of reasons on why  you should avoid New Year’s resolutions is not exhaustive; there are many more thing you can do to make your personal growth up to 10 times faster.  See 35 Amazing Tips To Make Your Personal Growth 10 Times Faster for a more comprehensive summery. For those who might want to question the credibility of these tips, I give to you that am not a doctor nor a psychiatrist; what I am is an enthusiastic researcher who gets inspirations from professionals and research from various fields topped up with real life experience and a little bit of common sense.