The real reason why New Year's resolutions are doomed to fail.

Make just ONE change. The rest will fall into place.

The year begins and we all have good intentions. We're going to quit drinking, smoking, eating cake, lounging on the sofa, over spending, over eating and otherwise enjoying ourselves. We dive into the new year attempting to change all these things all at once! To go from a diet mainly consisting of chocolate and mince pies washed down with a particularly nice branded Irish cream liqueur, slobbing on the couch watching re runs of movies and only moving to go to the loo, we suddenly decide overnight to eat nothing but celery, drink nothing but water, and take ourselves off to the gym 4 times a week.

 It's a shock to the system, especially our sluggish, mince pie fueled systems and it's doomed for failure from the start. The reason it is doomed is because it is too big and complicated to imagine. There are too many elements to the change.

These things need taking slowly. We need to pick just one thing to focus on and get good at doing just that one new thing. We need to find time to fit it into our daily routine, we need to change the habits that have become hard wired over the years, to make new default settings. We need to reset our behaviour so we  instinctively know what to do in any given circumstance. Only then have we any real chance of making the changes we long to make.