How to Achieve Your New Year’s Resolutions

When the new year rolls around, it’s a good opportunity to evaluate our life. It’s a good time to ask ourselves, “Am I reaching my goals or am I feeling unhappy with something in my life?” When we realize that we’re unsatisfied with something in our life, that’s when we often set New Year’s resolutions.  

We set goals for a reason. When it comes to resolutions, these things you want to accomplish or change are important to you. They often have meaning to you. That shouldn’t be dismissed!  

A year is an awfully long time though! Our lives are so busy that sometimes we forget what we had for lunch. If that’s the case, how are we going to remember what our goals are three months from now, let alone nine months from now?

These resolutions that we choose are important to us, but at the same time, if we don’t find ways to keep them in mind, it’s so easy to lose track and essentially slip up on our resolution. We tend to get wrapped up in our current habits or the way we’ve been living our life up until this point. By making a resolution, that means that we want to change how we do things, but making changes is hard. It takes time, energy, and effort.  

Here are some ways that you can keep on track or to get yourself back on track if you feel you’ve slipped up with your New Year’s resolutions.

Clarify what your resolution means to you. Sometimes we know what we want to do with our year, but we use really vague terms. A common example that I hear a lot is “I want to be happy this year.” That’s a really great idea, but it’s a hard thing to measure. So when you get to the end of the year, how do you know if you’ve accomplished this resolution? The more specific we can be about what specific task we want to accomplish, the better we are at actually knowing how to reach them. So instead of “I want to be happy this year,” you might say “I want to do one thing per week that I enjoy.”

Figure out exactly how to reach this goal. I think that a lot of the time, we make our resolution and then sort of stop there. But the more we know about how to reach this goal, the more likely we are to reach it. This may mean asking yourself what changes may have to happen in your life in order for this to happen and how ready you are for those changes to happen.

Break down the resolution into smaller steps. Making changes in our life can be difficult, so we’re more likely to be successful if we make changes in smaller increments. This often feels counter-intuitive, because it may sound easier to get all the changes taken care of at once. But if we change everything about our lives all at once, then we’re likely to become overwhelmed and revert to our old habits. If we make smaller changes, they are more likely to be something we incorporate into our everyday life. When it comes to resolutions and longer-term goals, the way we can help ourselves take smaller steps while still working towards our bigger goals, is by breaking this big goal into smaller steps. A year is 12 months, so what do you want to accomplish in one month that would help you make progress towards your resolution?  

Find a way to remind yourself about the resolution. There’s truth about the idea of out of sight, out of mind. If we set a resolution and then don’t think about it until next year, we probably won’t be making any progress. Whereas if we find ways to remind ourselves that this goal is important to us or what our baby steps are to help us reach the goal, then we’re far more likely to be taking conscious steps to achieve our resolution.

Don’t call something a failure. If we have a bad day, or even a bad month, when it comes to resolutions, we often have a tendency to call it a failure. That’s such a heavy word. It implies that we’ve already ruined our entire resolution for the whole year, even though we may have only had one slip-up for the day. It also makes it hard to be motivated to continue working on our resolution, even though the year isn’t over and we could still make progress towards a goal we find important. There are plenty of other words you can use if you have a hard time with the resolution, like calling it a slip-up, setback, or stumble.

Start right back up again if you stumble. Think about this: you slip up and break your diet. We could claim that the whole day is a wash, so we might as well binge for the rest of the day. But if we do that, then we end up consuming far more calories than if we had just started immediately back up again. The sooner we get back on our resolution, the more progress we make. You don’t have to wait for New Years to restart a resolution.

Reflect on your progress. Sometimes we get so caught up in what we aren’t doing, that we don’t allow ourselves to see our actual progress. But progress can be rewarding! It’s a sort of emotional reward. It’s so common to get caught up in using negatives to motivate ourselves, but showing ourselves progress can be a positive reminder that can help us continue to make changes throughout the whole year.

New Years is a great time to evaluate our lives. We can see if there are any changes that we want to make, and then we can take steps to make those changes. Making any changes is difficult enough, but there’s no reason to make it harder on yourself than it already is. Remember, counseling can help you reach your goals if you’re having a hard time on your own.