Stop making resolutions you can’t keep. Brooke Nolly’s five tips will help you align with your true goals and make 2025 your year. Photo / 123rf
Stop making resolutions you can’t keep. Brooke Nolly’s five tips will help you align with your true goals and make 2025 your year. Photo / 123rf
Life coach Brooke Nolly shares five tips for a fulfilling 2025.
We’re all familiar with making and ultimately failing well-intended New Year resolutions. Whether that’s losing weight or never quite signing up for that te reo night class.
Statistics show around 80% of new gym members whojoin in January quit within five months and that by the end of the first week of the new year, 23% of people have quit their resolutions.
According to life and business coach Brooke Nolly, we keep setting ourselves up to fail when we make New Year resolutions because we don’t tend to ask ourselves the right questions. It’s important to identify the real “why” behind said resolutions.
Over the past seven years she’s helped hundreds design a life that is more aligned to their core needs, values and desires through her 1:1 and group coaching programmes. According to Nolly, instead of resolutions, we should be focusing on designing lives we actually enjoy. “Sustainable resolutions that align with what you truly want rather than ‘I should join a gym so I can lose weight’ for example. Instead, let’s get intentional,” says Nolly.
Eighty per cent of those who join gyms in January quit within five months. Photo / 123rf
A common resolution is “I want to lose weight”. A more descriptive reality is you want to feel fit and agile; she explains. “You want to curate a wardrobe that represents who you know yourself to be. You want to feel confident … You want to feel lean, strong and energised. You want to be desired by that certain love interest. Feeling vivacious and magnetic is what you’re really after. You desire to elevate yourself. And you ultimately want who you know yourself to be on the inside reflected on the outside. So really, it’s not about the weight. The weight loss is the by-product of getting clear on how you want to feel. We want the result of having lost the weight, but it’s not the true motivating factor. We’re motivated by who we get to become in the process of that,” says Nolly. “Create a vision board that matches your aesthetic and that felt state. Think of the sort of outfits that you’d wear, the activities you’d do and the way that you would show up in the world if your desired result had already occurred. We’re far more motivated by visual and sensory cues versus ‘come to my boot camp and lose 10 kgs with a strict weight loss plan’.”
And therein lies the reason why people mostly fall off the New Year’s resolution wagon, says Nolly, because they can’t visualise or see that a new way of being could be their reality.
Visualising success with a vision board boosts motivation for your goals. Photo / 123rf
“All they’re seeing is how hard and how big that mountain is and how much effort and exertion it’s going to take to shed the weight. They think they must do it the hard way, the restrictive way, the pushing, the getting up early, the strong-arming and not realising that it’s a messy incremental step-by-step process of holding true to the vision,” she says. “What’s the ‘why’? That’s the important part. If you can’t feel a strong ‘why’ then you’re probably going to fall off the wagon because it’s not sustainable to do it for anyone else but you.”
Brooke’s top five tips for designing the life you want
1. Write a list of what you are no longer available for and what you are leaving behind in 2024. Get really honest, let it flow, don’t overthink it.
2. How do you want to feel in 2025? Felt states = joy, peace, ease, flow. Whatever it is for you. Write it down.
3. Ask yourself what you want and why you want it. It helps to look at the list you made in step one. What’s the opposite of that? That’s what you actually want. For example, if you’re leaving behind perfectionism and people pleasing then the opposite of that would be the permission to get started, be seen, get messy and hold true to what you believe in, with conviction.
4. Take an inventory check of your life and ask yourself “what are the barriers that would stop me from actually executing on this? What are the things that have historically tripped me up?”
5. Your only responsibility is to commit to the list of things you’d like to do more of. Can you do it, even if it feels uncomfortable? By doing these self-reflective exercises you become super clear on how you want to feel, what you’re calling in and as a result, your life will elevate.
