One of our EverWalk team members wrote about New Year’s resolutions in her 2020 book, Living Love: 12 Heart-Centered Practices to Transform Your Life.

We asked Victoria Price to share some of her thoughts about resolutions vs practice when it comes to walking, as we move into a New Year this week.

I’m a lifelong walker. It’s been one of my go-to practices for over a quarter century. Practice being the operative word. My book is all about practice – heart-centered practice, to be precise. And I began the book – chapter one, sentence one – with this look at New Year’s resolutions.

“At the end of every year, most of us make a list of New Year’s resolutions.

Coming out of the holiday season, having often overeaten and overspent, can feel like the perfect time to think about what we want to do better was we face the beautiful blank slate of a brand-new year.

 According to Inc. magazine, not only to we make resolutions, but we also make the same resolutions: dieting or eating healthier, exercising, losing weight, saving more and spending less, quitting smoking, drinking less, and finding a new job.

When you look at that list, what do you see? Probably a few things you’ve wanted to do yourself. I certainly do! But what I also see is precisely what makes New Year’s resolutions so notoriously unreliable. So unreliable, in fact, that studies have shown that also sixty percent of us make resolutions ever years, less than eight percent of us achieve them. (That doesn’t stop us though. Next year we’ll start all over again, determined to believe that this time it will be different.)

What I see when I look at that list is mostly fear.

Too often when we make our resolutions, we are making them from a place of hear, even though it may not feel that way.  Fear is the reason why resolutions usually fail.”

Have I intrigued you? And what does this have to do with walking? Well, as I said earlier walking has been one of my go-to heart practices for over a quarter century. Believe me, I have needed it. Because I have been a workaholic, someone who struggled with anxiety and self-doubt as well as, what my dear friend Mary calls the “bottom of the barrel” – self-loathing.

Discovering the power of practice changed my life, because it shifted me out of my anxious head and into my hopeful heart.Every day that I walk – and I walk five to ten miles every day – I remember what I love and how good that feels.

Why does a heart-centered practice like walking work when New Year’s resolutions usually don’t? Because resolutions start from lack — and lack is one of fear’s fundamental tactics. Here’s what I wrote about lack a little further on in chapter one:

“When we say that we want to stop overeating or overspending or overindulging, when we say we want a better job or improved habits, what we usually mean is something is missing from our lives: health, money, fitness, balance, peace of mind. Which is to say, we start from a place of lack.

Lack is one of fear’s fundamental tactics. It keeps us focused on our worry about what we are living without, on our anxiety about what we do not have enough of, and on our agitation about what we have lost. Even if we say “I want to eat healthier, what we really saying underneath that positive intention is we’re afraid we’re not healthy. “

We make resolutions each new year, when really we should be creating practices.

Like walking.

A problem begins with fear.

            Will I ever lose the weight?

            Will I keep exercising?

            Can I ever quit smoking?

            Will anyone ever love me?

What is a practice? A practice is doing something, instead of talking about doing something, in a conscious, committed, daily, and deliberate way.

What we make a habit becomes a habit. If we keep looking at what we don’t have, that’s all we’ll ever see. But if we practice what we want more of in our lives, we are already bringing those qualities into our lives. 

For example, if you say you want to exercise more, what you are really saying is, “I don’t feel good about how much I exercise. I don’t exercise enough.”

But if you get out and walk, guess what? You ARE exercising more!

One of my favorite new initiatives that EverWalk created this year is The EverWalk Mile. You might think that, for someone like me, who already has a daily practice of walking, what good does a mile do? But I’ll tell you what – that mile has saved my bacon a lot this year. From time to time, there have been days when I haven’t wanted to or thought I could or perhaps felt I didn’t need to walk. But then I remembered that I at least had to get my EverWalk Mile in. And when I did, that mile usually turned into two or four. And whatever had made me feel stagnant or down or too busy faded away.

I have a dear friend who used to be a runner. After two serious accidents, she was told by countless doctors that she might never walk again. Let alone run. She had two small dogs – and no backyard. She had to take them out twice a day. She missed her active life. So, each day, she practiced walking a few steps more. Sometimes the goal was just the end of her block. But each day that she walked, she walked! And that changed her whole mindset. Instead of fearing what the doctors predicted, she was seeing what she could do. She could walk! Now she hikes and plays tennis competitively. She got there by putting one foot in front of another.

I have another friend who wants to lose a lot of weight. When I first met her, she was the most sedentary person I have ever met. Why? Because just walking a block was excruciating. This summer I told her about The EverWalk Mile, and now she’s hooked. She leaves work to walk; she gets out even in winter. The other day she told me that she realized that the thing she is learning from walking is that taking one step at a time on her walks is teaching her how to do that with food. Not only that, it is reminding her that she can still be the active, outdoor-loving, travel enthusiast she was when she was younger and fitter.

This is how heart-centered practice works! It changes the channel from what we believe we can’t do to showing us, step by step, what we can and are doing. What we love to do. 

I can’t speak highly enough about The EverWalk Mile. You can download a calendar HERE on the EverWalk website and cross off every day you walk. You can join the Nation Network to meet others who are walking their EverWalk Mile. You can walk virtually through EverWalk’s collaboration with the Pacer app by clicking HERE.

But mostly, you can put one foot in front of another in following your heart instead of making yet another resolution that you probably won’t keep.

In my book I quoted part of a conversation with a dear friend of mine about practice. Her name is Melissa Etheridge, and music is her daily, deliberate, conscious and committed heart-centered practice. She said, Practice keeps you humble and enables you to dream the dream. And practicing the dream every day is where the happiness lives. It doesn’t like in the materialization of the dream. It likes in the practice of it, the journey of it, every single day. Practicing helps everything. I cannot emphasize enough what a difference it makes in your life.”

Don’t we walkers know that? Most of us aren’t walking anywhere. We’re just walking. Step after step after step. And it is what keeps us happy. The journey is truly the destination.

Let us all walk into 2021 with our hearts leading the way!