JANUARY | 2020 | FRONT PAGE

DERESOLVER

Alright, Beaux, this is the moment we’ve been waiting for since the iconic Barbara Walters made her first introduction on what would become one of ABC’s highest rated news programs. This is 2020 [queue Score Production’s musical entrance]. The arrival of the new year is, as always, characterized with the old tradition of the new year’s resolution. We’ve been making these fake promises to ourselves since the Babylonian era, and...yeah, it's past time to give it a rest. How many of us can attest to actually keeping a New Year’s resolution, or that we know anyone who has kept theirs? Our guess is not many, Beaux. Not many at all. That’s why we’re ringing in our third annual All New issue with the recommendation of breaking the old habit of the New Year’s resolution.

In 2017 we promised ourselves that we’d quit smoking, but we’re in the middle of a Newport right now. We (publicly) swore to ourselves that we’d lose all that unwanted weight, yet 2020 finds us thirty pounds heavier than we were in 2018. Last year we resolved to save more money, but then Hot Girl Summer hit and we got caught up in doing bald headed hoe shit with our friends....and, well [...]. We’ve all dropped the ball moments after the ball dropped, and 2020 probably won’t be any different for most of us. We know this to be true deep down, but admitting it isn’t an easy feat. No worries, that’s why you’ve got us. 

Whether we’ve already made our New Year’s resolution, or are still conjuring up a list, Beaux here to tell you to stop before you fake start. The weight isn’t going anywhere, the money won’t be saved, and the Newports may turn to Kools, but either way the habit is here to stay. This may sound pretty shitty, but almost every piece of research (yeah, we do that here) points in the direction of us being right. According to The Business Insider, 80% of us suck when it comes to seeing our New Year’s resolutions through to completion. USA Today cites January 17th as the default death day for most New Year’s resolutions, but about forty percent of those who make resolutions are able to hold the line up until the six month mark. And to ensure that none of us feel like crap for failing to maintain the promises we make to ourselves, just know that Stephen Shapiro, an innovative speaker, wants us to know that only eight percent of people are successful in achieving their resolutions. 

The biggest reason that ninety two percent of us fail at keeping our resolutions is because we almost always make them at the wrong time or for the wrong reasons. We don’t plan, accept or challenge our limitations, and if we were being honest with ourselves, we’d be able to openly admit that we don’t wanna do the shit to begin with.  The thought of starting anew at the beginning of the year is cute, but that’s not always the best time to start anything we’re not ready for.

Doing so is similar to noticing the police officer behind the stop sign we were planning to blow through. It requires a very hard stop. Bruce Wayne didn’t wake up one day and decide to be Batman, it was a process, and it took planning, and so will the things we resolve to do, to start, or to stop. And while honesty is always the best policy, being honest with ourselves isn’t always easy. 

Our failure to plan explains the self inflicted anxiety we experienced as we waltzed our asses into the LA Fitness last January without a single clue as to how we were going to go about losing the weight and toning up. Similarly we just as soon assumed that we could stop smoking cold turkey and with prayer. However, since Jesus doesn’t make it a habit to position himself behind the bodega counter to remind us that we were going to stop smoking “on God”,  our resolution literally goes up in smoke. Regardless of whatever the resolution may be, the truth is that we don’t see them out because we don’t want to.

As always, there are solutions to these problems. The first is to simply not resolve to do anything that we’re not prepared to do, to not commit to things whose execution we haven’t planned. Wanna go to the gym? Go, but with purpose. Wanna stop smoking? Then do so with intention and a Chantix prescription. We’ll never go as far as to say that anybody can do anything, but we can do most things based on how determined we are. The more determined we are, the more likely we’ll achieve whatever goal we’ve set for ourselves.

We’d all do well to remember the importance of setting goals for ourselves. Read that again just in case the italicization didn’t provide enough emphasis. Building that Instagram ready body is going to be more fulfilling if we’re doing it for ourselves, our health, and not for the likes. The sooner we start doing things for us, the sooner that getting these things done will not only become easier, but more enjoyable. The biggest part of this is keeping our goals as quiet as we can. The best time for people to realize what we’re doing for ourselves is when it's already done. Keeping our resolutions close to the vest ensures that people don’t false flag our goals to the point that we put less work into achieving them. 

Planning our resolutions is only the first step on the path to success. As long as we know exactly what we want to do, how we’re going to do it, are realistic about our abilities, and set appropriate benchmarks for ourselves, we’ll be good. Many of us are fully aware of what our limitations are, but there are some who struggle with accepting them. If we’re going to see our New Year’s resolutions through and past January 17th, we’ve got to be real with ourselves. Honestly. A 5 a.m. gym call might sound doable but only if we’re willing to be in bed by 9:30. Of course none of this will ever become a reality if we’re not the morning type. A lot of us set ourselves up for failure by not accepting our limitations, and the sooner we do that, the sooner we’ll find comfort with setting an evening gym schedule. 

The most essential tool in keeping our resolutions is honesty. This requires us to take ourselves for who we are. Our success is going to require us to reflect on why our resolutions are what they are, to accept and forgive ourselves for past and potentially future failings. There are plenty of trained professionals who can not only tell us how we lie to ourselves, but why. The long of the short of it is that we sometimes deceive ourselves with the hopes that doing so will help us with our resolutions, but the results are almost always quite the opposite.

All of these things leave us with two options when it comes to making and sticking to our New Year’s resolutions. We can either properly plan them with a knowledge of who we are and our abilities, or we can save ourselves the time and humiliation and deresolve. Either option is acceptable, as both require for us to be honest with ourselves, and there’s never anything wrong with that. So as we rapidly approach that January 17th expiration date for whatever resolutions we’ve set for ourselves, we’ve got to be mindful of these things and the ways they’ll impact the way we move in the future. The goal is never to not set resolutions or goals, but to be realistic with ourselves when it comes to doing so. Our resolutions must be self serving, and free of social expectations, drive us towards thinking, doing, and feeling better, and be as manageable as they are realistic. And if we can do this, we can do damn near anything!