22/12-14 - Press releases

Dump your New Year's resolutions and reach your goals

The Danish high altitude Mountaineer Ivan Braun urges people to save time, hassle and the disappointments with New Year's resolution, and instead use the peace of Christmas to think through your goals. This way are you much closer in achieving your goals

New Year's Eve is traditionally the time of year when many set goals for the coming year in the form of New Year's resolutions. However, more than 50% of all new years resolutions fails. That is why mountaineer Ivan Braun urges people to save time, hassle and the disappointments with New Year's resolution, and instead use the peace of Christmas to think through and note your goals. This way are you much closer in achieving your goals

As a climber you are used to working very hard to achieve the goal. The goal is always to come down from the mountain to safety, and not as tempted, to believe that the goal is reaching the top. Reaching the top is merely a sub-target of the project.

And here at the end of the year, many people who work with goals for themselves in the form of New Year's resolution. According to Gallup's (a Danish research institute) more than 20% of all of us jump into the new year with one or more New Year's resolutions. Further have more than 50% experienced that we did not reach our goal with our New Year's resolution.

Is New Year really the right time to set goals for us selves?

And doesn't it require a bit more than just jumping down from a chair, to set a genuine and realistic goal?

You never reach a goal if you do not either believe, or is passionate about it. No mountain can be climbed without the belief that one can climb the mountain (knowledge) or that you are passionate about getting up and down (Willpower), or goal (Getting safe down to base camp with all toes and fingers intact). Mountaineering was once defined as 90% suffering and 10% pleasure, having that in mind would it be impossible to imagine a mountaineering project as a New Years resolution, wouldn't it ?

And it takes work to define goals for yourself, your career, love, fitness, training / education and so on. But just the fact that you are thinking about your own goals is a reasonable objective in itself.

How would you like to celebrate New Year?

It may be purely simple and easy to get started working with the goals and objectives. Start by thinking backwards from next year:

What would you like to be able to look back on in years to come
What would you like to be
What would you like to have achieved
Want to lose weight, how much would you like to have lost you
Would you run, how far and when
Do you want to climb a mountain, which and when
etc.

Record all of the goals you remember: work, love, academic, study, training, career, physics - or perhaps mountain climbing.

Once you have a list of goals, you need to think about every target, and make up your mind whether you really want it or not.

For example if you do not care how much your clothes tightens, do not bother speculating about what you eat or even plan a weight loss. If you don't care (are not truly passionate about it, you will never reach a weight loss goal)

Remove the goals which seems wrong and instead focus with them as you feel is right.

Some goals are perhaps a bit more complex, and require a little more work where others may be straightforward. For example, it may be simple to change a habit to drink more water (start the day with a large glass) where as the goal is to complete a marathon or climb a mountain, may be more complex with more specific objectives.

And as you probably can sense it requires a lot more than just jumping down from a chair to sit some real goals.

Do yourself a favor and work with your goals.

Use Christmas peace is to think through your goals and write them down.

As a mountaineer, I have defined my written my goals for 2015 - the year when I climb Mount Everest, the world's highest mountain, unsupported and without bottled oxygen. My goal Everest has been tattooed on my upper arm since 2010.

Before and after Everest do I have specific goals, both as a mountaineer, husband, father and colleague, it has been a habit for me for years to write down my goals.

Follow Ivan Braun at www.facebook.com/ivanbraun.dk for more inspiration.