Immortal Wordsmith

Making New Year’s Resolutions are a cornerstone of New Year tradition. Many of us set out with good intentions and wish to keep our resolutions – but many of us fail for one reason or another.

This year can be different though and this guide helps you achieve your New Year’s Resolutions.

Making a resolution is a choice you have made to improve yourself or your life in some way, being able to achieve them can have a massively positive impact on you. Here’s five ways to meet your New Year’s Resolution goals.

Be Realistic with Your Expectations and Goals

A big reason people fail to stick with their New Year’s Resolutions is the goals they’ve set are unrealistic or the timeframe they wish to achieve them in is too short.

For example, a common resolution is to lose weight and you might be tempted to target a large amount of weight loss in a short space of time.

In this scenario it would be better to aim for a smaller amount of weight loss in a reasonable timeframe – such as losing a stone over the next three months rather than losing ten stone over twelve months.

The beauty of resolutions is you get to set your goals and there are no rules. There is nothing stopping you from losing more weight after you have hit your first goal and if anything, once you have hit your first goal, you will have the motivation to continue.

New Year’s Resolutions – Visualise Your Goal

There is an old saying about keeping your eyes on the prize. This can be made infinitely more difficult if you don’t have a clear idea about what the prize is.

Going back to the weight loss example it is easy to see the goal as a reduced reading on the scales, but this isn’t your goal. This is a measurement of your goal.

Instead visualise what you will look like after you have lost weight. Will you be able to wear different clothes? Will you be more body confident? Will you feel healthier?

Visualising the outcome of hitting your resolution helps you have something tangible to work toward that is exciting. Let’s face it, simply seeing a reduced weight reading isn’t going to inspire much excitement.

Understand Failures Are Part of the Process

Nobody has ever achieved something without failing at least in part along the way. Failures can derail your progress if you allow them to sit with you and override your determination to reach your results.

Failures could be as simple as not going to the gym when you planned or having a lazy day when you should have been working.

Understand you are not restricted by your failures. You are restricted by how you deal with any hiccups you experience along the way.

For example, if you had a lazy day, shrug it off and continue as you planned beforehand.

DON’T be tempted to overload your next workday to compensate for your failure. This will put additional pressure on you when there needn’t be, and you might burn out and give up altogether. Remember, you set the rules of the game, the only priority you have is getting to your goal.

If it takes a little more time to reach your goal, so be it, you are best serving reaching your goal a little late than not reaching it at all.

New Year’s Resolutions – Document Progress

When things seem difficult it can be extremely easy to forget the good progress you have made so far.

Documenting progress allows you to do a few things:

• Stay on track and understand where you are in the process,
• Remind yourself of past progress to inspire future progress,
• Understand failures or challenges and how you overcame them before.

Documenting progress needn’t be an arduous task. You might want to simply text a mate how you are getting on or make a note on your phone.

Tell Someone About Your New Year’s Resolution

We all tell someone about our New Year’s Resolutions but oftentimes people expect others to fail or give up.

It has almost become synonymous to state a resolution and have no prospect of seeing it through.

Achieving a New Year’s Resolution after you have told someone will give you a sense of pride. You will have bucked the trend and demonstrated you can attain the goals you set for yourself.

By telling someone, you also have someone else invested in your goals. If you give up, it is going to be someone you have to disappoint by explaining why you gave up.

In summary, having a New Year’s Resolution can be a powerful way to take positive action in your life. Make sure you have a clear idea a realistic goal and how to get there.

You will find, hitting resolutions becomes easier and you can make incremental steps toward becoming the person you want to be.