And hello to you and welcome to the Richard Nichols podcast, the Personal Development

podcast series that's here to help inspire, educate and motivate you to be the best you

can be. I'm psychotherapist Richard Nichols, and this is episode 201.

It's titled Resolutions.

And if you're ready, we'll start the show.

So, it's July now.

We are exactly halfway through the year to the day.

How are your New Year's resolutions going?

I thought I'd bring it up today because enough time has gone by for any resolutions you might have made in January to have fallen by the wayside completely. And if those things were important to

you back then, there is maybe a good time to revisit them now. If the exercise bike

you bought at Christmas has now turned into a clothes rail or the list of books you said you were

going to read has turned into cat videos on YouTube instead, then I'm here to remind you of what

you said you wanted only six months ago. So here are a few tips at getting yourself back in the game.

Firstly, we need to look at what we're actually dealing with here,

because resolutions tend to fall into one of three different categories.

We have result resolutions, habit resolutions and holistic resolutions.

So, result resolutions are when you're trying to reach a specific goal. Lose half a stone,

drop a dress size, run 5K without collapsing, that sort of thing. It's something that's obvious when it's been

completed and obvious when it's not. These have actually been shown to be the easiest to stick to,

because you can see progress along the way. You can see the effect of the work you put in,

which is quite motivating and helps to keep you going to achieve more. Habit resolutions, on the

other hand, never really seem to have a specific goal. It doesn't come to an end. The satisfaction

...