Life Coaches Offer Tips on Making Resolutions Stick

For an example of a “complete and epic fail” in keeping a New Year’s Resolution, Patch thanks Port Washington-Saukville reader Jason Godersky, who told us on Facebook that his 2011 promise to avoid fast food lasted until Jan. 5.

“Darn McChickens and Dollar Menu,” he wrote.

Undoubtedly, similar stories abound. How to do better in 2012? We asked those who make a living offering such support, “life coaches” in and near various Southeastern Wisconsin Patch Communities.

Jamie Durner of BodyMind Coaching in Brookfield recommends spinning your resolution toward the positive — for example, don’t commit to losing weight, commit to running a 5K race.

“If you focus on the negative, you want it more and more and more,” Durner said.

In addition, she said: “Make sure the resolution is based on the present and what you want, not based on a past thing or being done for someone else.”

Julie O’Keeffe of Next Step Goals in Wauwatosa is not a big believer in New Year’s Resolutions, but said no matter the time or impetus for change, it’s important to have a range of strategies to cope with obstacles that emerge.

“My experience has been people fail because life gets in the way, and they don’t have the strategies to deal with it,” she said.

In order to get in better shape, for instance, you might have to rise earlier to find exercise time, which in turn could require changes of others in your life. Managing all those lifestyle changes among different personalities is key to reaching goals.

Betty Vollbrecht of Glendale is a Certified Lifeline Practitioner who suggests “not to make your resolution a specific task, which can cause you to experience failure, but to allow yourself to feel what it is you want to feel as you move into 2012.  Feeling it will allow you to attract those things into your life with a similar vibration. … Think of the best day of your life, how did that feel.  Is that what you want to feel as you go into 2012?  Then choose the things that make you feel that way.”

Perhaps Godersky himself has the best attitude as he tries again to kick the fast food habit. He wrote on his Facebook post: “Trying is the first step towards failure and redemption. — Me”