DiLiGO's guide to New Year’s Resolutions

New Year’s resolutions are notoriously difficult to keep. It’s probably because we make them on the high of the celebration and one too many glasses of bubbly. At the stroke of midnight, you may be 100% convinced that you can and will exercise for two hours every day for the next 365 days, and it may seem totally reasonable that you will take up sky diving to live a more exciting life.

It is no surprise that by lunchtime on January 1st you’ve forgotten everything.

However, even sober and simple New Year’s resolutions usually fade from memory as soon as the holidays are over. The real problem is not your state of mind when you make them, but your own beliefs and habits around setting goals for yourself.  

Studies on goal-setting by Professor Edwin A Locke show that it is more difficult to take on a very large complex goal than to break it up into smaller, more manageable tasks.

You might want to resolve to “be a better person” this year. But unless you define that in terms of small manageable steps, you are doomed to failure.

So you might rather say:

“I will be kinder to my grandmother, donate to charity and stop throwing shoes at the neighbours’ barking dog at two in the morning.”

Those steps seem simple enough, right?

However, there is one more obstacle to reaching your goals. Inside each of us is a sceptic who says, “Oh, really?” the moment we resolved to do anything and then lists every past failure as proof that you are incapable of sticking things out. This is a major demotivator, which can kill any new year’s resolution.

The solution is to change your track record and convince your inner sceptic that you can do what you set out to do. This is much simpler than it sounds. You need to show the critic that you can keep your promises, so make promises you know you will keep. Start with something simple like,

“I promise I will blink regularly to keep my eyeballs nice and moist.”
 “I will take many breaths in the next hour.”
“I resolve to definitely brush my teeth some time between now and Wednesday.”
“I will walk several steps today.”

Once you’ve shown the inner sceptic that you can manage those things, you can move onto tasks that are more complex:

“I will press the spin button on my favourite DiLiGO Slots game.”
“I will press it again.”
“I will increase my bets.”
“I will upgrade this game.”

Very soon, your inner sceptic will be so bored with all your good behaviour it will go to sleep and leave you alone. This will give you a fresh boost of confidence.

Now you can move onto bigger goals:

“I will get to the bonus round in Token Rockets”
“I will beat all my friends and make it onto the leaderboard.”
“I will double all my points.”

When you achieve one of these goals, you have proven once and for all that you are a winner, capable of tackling anything and achieving results. It will be so much easier now to stick to your real New Year’s Resolution and make one of your dreams come true.

Which means you can use DiLiGO Slots as your very own confidence booster. It is a psychological tool for success!

On top of that, it helps to have someone giving you encouragement when battle with your inner sceptic gets tough.

That is why we at DiLiGO have made our own resolutions:

“We promise to give all our players the chance to become champions by bringing them the most exciting games and fantastic new opportunities to win big!

We resolve to make 2011 the best DiLiGO Games year ever!”

Happy New Year and Happy Winning!