We’re almost halfway through January of 2010 and those New Year’s Resolutions we made two weeks ago are either proving to be challenging, doable, or we’ve already forgotten about them all together. Maybe the resolution you made was expecting too much of yourself?

If you said, “I’m going to stop eating candy,” or “I’m going to quit smoking cigarettes,” or “I’m going to lose 15 pounds in two months,” you’re setting yourself up for a bit of failure because you can’t expect to be perfect 100% of the time. You also can’t expect to take bad habits and instantly reverse them overnight. There’s bound to be some relapsing, but if you fall back into an old habit for a few days, like eating tons of junk food at night when you’re stressed out, it doesn’t mean you’ve completely failed and you should give up on that resolution.

Building better habits takes time…but it also takes willpower and self-restraint!

Here is a segment from my favorite chapter in a book by my favorite philosopher, Aristotle:

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an action, but a habit.”

If we repeatedly only test our blood sugar some time in the afternoon, or repeatedly skip out on adding up the carbs in a meal, or repeatedly eat SourPatchKids and Dunkaroos, we can’t be surprised if our blood sugars are through the roof, if we gain weight, if we feel absolutely lousy. On top of all of that, we could feel emotionally lousy because we know we’re making bad choices, disappointing ourselves and feeling guilty.

“We are what we repeatedly do.”

What if you repeatedly, consistently, check your blood sugar every morning when you get out of bed? Even when you really, really, don’t want to…what if you forced yourself to anyways for three weeks in a row? Just three weeks?

Is it possible, then, that those three weeks might develop a really good habit?

If we repeatedly tell lies, we become liars. If we repeatedly do kind things for people around us, we become kind people.

Just changing the way we approach one simple task—and forcing ourselves to do

something good for us that we don’t usually want to do—could lead to naturally excellent habits.

A simple example: I remember a couple of years ago when I first started working out with my trainer, Andrew, and I had to stop eating something sweet every day. I love chocolate, but I had gotten into a habit of eating it practically every night before I went to bed! Completely unnecessary!

So, I tried to replace that habit with something else. I would make a cup of tea with two packets of Splenda so it would taste sweet, and try to distract myself from the previous craving. The first month was difficult—man, I missed that chocolate—but every time the thought of “chocoooolatteeeee” popped into my head, I told myself, “No, no. No. Not today. You can go one freaking day without chocolate.” And each day I told myself, “Oh, c’mon, one more day. You can go one more day without chocolate.”