Intentions for the New Year

Happy new year my friends!

Hope you had a fantastic holiday and are staying warm... wherever you are!

I am back! And very excited about the new year.  Next week I start my Health Coach training through the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and I can’t wait to delve into it, and most importantly, to start applying all my nutrition and health coach training to prospective clients in 2014. I’m also very excited about growing this blog and many great posts to come!

New Year, New Intentions

Do you have new year’s health or fitness resolution? I invite you to consider not to.  

What? Stay with me...

My nutrition school provided some “motivational speaking” courses and training on how to guide clients for healthy victories and one very common mistake we often see is setting these very high goals or “resolutions” that are sometimes not only hard, but stressful (counterproductive to health?), and even unrealistic to attain.

If you have a child and have gone through potty training, transitioning to sleeping alone, or any big changes you probably know that they say to “baby steps- celebrate the small victories” and not to have unrealistic expectations that can crush their confidence of attaining the long end goal.

We never grow up that way.

I invite you to consider forgetting about resolutions and setting up intentions.

Here’s why.

The definition of resolution is:

1. The state or quality of being resolute; firm determination.

2. A resolving to do something.

3. A course of action determined or decided on.

An intention is:

1. A course of action that one intends to follow.

2. An aim that guides action; an objective.

I especially like the definition of intention that says “an aim that guides action” and especially dislike the inflexible counterpart of resolution of "firm determination" and "action determined or decided on".  

An intention is usually an area of your life, like for example, “fitness” or “healthy eating” or “stress management”, “improved relationships”… the actions though, may vary from time to time.  I know for fitness I’ll be at the gym more than I like in the next few months, but come summer, I’ll ditch that to way more walking outside, swimming in the pool, hiking and other outdoor activities that might not constitute a “workout” but will still maintain me fit and healthy.

However, if I set the “resolution” of “working out 5 days a week for 45 minutes a day”, I set myself for disappointment (it has happened already!), and feeling shameful and guilty that I didn’t follow it.  The problem is once disappointment sets in, we lose confidence in ourselves and most times, interest in the intended goal.

Here is a great article on resolutions vs. intentions I encourage you to read.

So set your intentions for 2014 (or for the day, week or month, for that matter!) and share with me: how can I help you? any areas you’d like to hear more about through this blog?

Stay tuned for many great, interesting and informative blog posts and delicious recipes to come! and don’t miss a post by adding your email to the link in the right sidebar (“Follow By Email”)