I stopped making New Year's resolutions some years back on account of the fact that there is often more power in surrender. I am chuckling here, but the vast majority of resolutions hardly even make it into February. Part of that is because it is actually not "your year," but the year of the Lord. I find it a bit amusing how we will often say, "thy will be done, on Earth as it is in heaven," and then promptly proceed to just lay out how everything is going to go down in 2023 based on our own will alone.
I mean this quite kindly, quite accepting, but I also happen to know that most of us have a somewhat fickle will that can cave under the slightest pressure. It's okay, God already knows this. Peter in the Bible is one my favorites, but even he heard the rooster crow. Even Michael, an incredible angel, knows his limits as it says in Jude 1:9. That is genuine strength rooted in truth, not weakness.
Someone once said, "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." The same, precise will and determination that got you to the point of needing to lose weight, needing to stop drinking, needing to save more money, is probably not the same will that should be put in charge of making all the future improvements.
We people also tend to a have all these issues around guilt, shame, failure, and not feeling worthy. It is kind of like piling an entire load of rocks on our self before setting off to climb the hill.
We often tend to try to take on more baggage, to pick up more obligations, work harder, rather then simply letting something go and setting it down. A lot of 12 step programs begin with, "admitting I am powerless and my life has become unmanageable." That is because it tends to work much more effectively. Let go and let God. Hand it over to Him.
CS Lewis in Mere Christianity says, "Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself."
A bit ironic, but often it seems like both secularists and religious people in modern times are running down the same road, insisting people must change based exclusively on our own intentions and will. This is probably why we say, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." The sheer number of idiocracies floating about right now are just staggering, everything from controlling climate change to being less white. Secularists have gone and created a religion of their very own, complete with threats of assorted hell if one does not comply.
I'd mock them and I sometimes do, but the real tragedy is that they are simply presenting a caricature of the worse religion has to offer. They didn't just invent the wheel, us religious people did it first. In spite of it all, I find this to be rather encouraging news. Rather then blaming foolish human behavior on religion, we can now blame it on human nature, on social hierarchies and social credit scores, and our perpetual attempts to control others rather then learning how to control ourselves.
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