How to Successfully Fulfill Your New Year Resolutions

With so many of us failing with our New Year resolutions, we sometimes wonder if we should even bother making them anymore. It seems that for many people, New Year resolutions are destined for failure anyway. I personally still make New Year resolutions. In fact, I enjoy making them. My resolutions are my personal goals that I want to achieve during the next twelve months and one of my major ones back in 1999 was to try my very best to win a world championship in karate. Another was to get certified as a ski instructor.

I already had many years of successful martial arts competition at the black belt level so a world title was realistically within my reach. Achieving such a goal would be symbolic for me on a personal level because I was never very athletic during my younger years. I was the little kid who always got bullied by the other kids.

But when I started in martial arts, I finally found a physical activity that I was able to excel in. Winning a karate world championship would certainly make up for all those younger years. My training throughout 1999 was consistent and progressed well. I was ready for the world championships in December.

The world championship event I was competing in that year was held at Niagara Falls. I breezed through the elimination rounds and then three days before the finals, I tore my anterior cruciate ligament or ACL during a practice session

Fortunately, Niagara Falls was only about an hour away from where I was living near Toronto so I rushed to my doctor to see what can be done. He said that surgery was the only way to fix a torn ACL. I told him that since I've come so far making it to the finals for the first time, I wanted to at least try to continue competing if at all possible. I didn't want to bow out and quit.

The divisions I qualified for were not combative ones and didn't involve any contact, so my doctor agreed to let me continue. He taped my knee up really tight, put me on strong painkillers and wished me luck.

I went back to Niagara Falls and ended up going against last year's world champion in the finals. Being faithful to my New Year resolution, I performed with everything I had and ended up winning as a karate world champion in my division. I could barely walk afterwards but for me, it was well worth it. I felt that I had finally redeemed myself after all these years.

As for my skiing, I didn't make it as an instructor that year. Even though both martial arts and skiing were part of my New Year resolutions, I didn't have the same commitment to the ski slopes as I did with martial arts. I scheduled time for martial arts and actively monitored my progress on a weekly basis. However, I couldn't say the same for my skiing, at least for 1999.

I learned that in order to fulfill your New Year resolutions successfully, you must make total commitment to them. This involves scheduling dedicated time each week to work on goals progressively and continuously monitoring the results. As a motivational keynote speaker, I spend a good portion of time during my motivational speeches on explaining this in detail for achieving goals whether they are New Year resolutions or other goals set during other times of the year.