Every year people make New Year resolutions for all the wrong reasons, writes Carmel Wynne.
Imagine you can achieve whatever goals you want to accomplish in 2007. What would you set out to do - heal relationships, advance your career, find a partner, improve your health, overcome depression or create a healthy work/life balance?
Think about any goal you want. Ask yourself: "What will achieving that outcome do for me?" The answer will always reflect a desire to feel better and be more accepting of you and your life situation.
People make changes because they believe they will be happier and more satisfied when they do.
Therapist John Overdurf had a client who came to him and said, "I'm very upset. My life is going down the tubes. I've been a millionaire four times."
This man was highly motivated to move away from poverty. Three times he lost his wealth. When he was poor he worked very hard. As his revenue built up and he had money in the bank his interest in work declined.
Once poverty was no longer an issue he got careless. He wouldn't finish work on contracts or he would forget to submit quotes to potential clients. It was only when he was again threatened with poverty that he took action.
This is an extreme example of someone who successfully went after what he believed he wanted, achieved the outcome he desired and sabotaged his success.
Those of us who make a New Year resolution because we desire to look and feel better have issues around how we think about ourselves and about our life situations.
Most of us have bought into media images that make us feel dissatisfied.
We are brainwashed into comparing ourselves with the beautiful people who appear to have it all, good looks, money, a great career. By comparison we find ourselves wanting. We may even feel inferior when we look at what others have achieved.
Clever advertisements hold out the promise that if only we used the right products we too could have the adoring partner, perfect house and powerful car. There is a part in all of us that dreams of what it would be like to have this perfect existence.
Even though we recognise intellectually that this is a fantasy, that promise of how it could be hooks us.
We recognise that the unblemished skin of the air-brushed models, or the traffic-free roads the latest model car purrs along or the spray that makes the kitchen look perfect with a single wipe are illusions, fantasies.
Yet these images titillate us with what we could have. So we end the old year by making New Year resolutions. We want results, ideally without making the effort to achieve them.
Some of us genuinely believe that if we use enough affirmations we will harness the power of positive thinking.
Telling myself that I can easily and joyfully achieve any goal without taking action is plain silly.
Affirmations and positive thinking help us recognise that even when things are falling apart we can have positive feelings. Seeing things from an optimistic perspective can give us hope. But positive words with no actions can't give miraculous results.
Every year thousands of us set out to change some aspect of ourselves or our lives.
We have it within our power to succeed but for all sorts of reasons we don't persist in our efforts. Many of us start out brilliantly and then something happens. We succeed.
We do what we set out to. We get the outcome we wanted but it doesn't feel as wonderful as we expected. So we go back to our old ways of thinking and acting. We sabotage our own success without any awareness of what we are doing.
If you made resolutions last year and failed to keep them don't blame a lack of willpower. The truth is that either you didn't want the outcome badly enough to persist or you sabotaged your own efforts.
There is a possibility that those of us who engage in self-sabotage are going after the wrong goals but the probability is that we're striving for the achievements that we think will make us happy.
People who are unhappy or dissatisfied with how they look and what they achieve have low self-esteem.
Their feelings of inferiority or personal inadequacy will never be assuaged by success.
The "feel-good" factor we all seek doesn't come from achieving our goals.
It's not generated by external sources. Feeling fulfilled and satisfied with life has more to do with what we think than what we achieve.
Imagine you can put an end to struggling and striving with a simple change, the decision to accept yourself and your life situation as it is.
Each of us has it within our power to do this and create the happiness we all desire.
Carmel Wynne is a life skills and business coach, author ofCoaching - The key to unlocking your potential .