Tips For Keeping Your New Year's Resolutions

As was mentioned before, having a resolution that is too vague will never last much past the winter. One of the keys to making a resolution successful is to dump the vagueness and turn your “lose weight” resolution into “lose 30 pounds.”

The most specific you are, the more accountable you can and should be. When it’s specific, it’s easier to track how you are doing and it’s easier to be held accountable. It can also help you celebrate the small steps (More on that later).

If your resolution has to do with losing weight or exercising more, it can be easy to measure your progress. Some goals or resolutions may be more difficult to measure, but being able to find a way to measure your resolution on a weekly or monthly basis will help with your accountability. You measure “exercise 3 times a week” or “pay off $50,000 in debt” or “save for a $20,000 car” very easily, because the numbers are there and you can easily track it.

There may be some resolutions that are more difficult to track, but in some way every resolution or goal can be tracked and measured. If not by numbers, you can track your progress through journal entries, notes in your phone, and notes on your calendar, or before-and-after photos.

This is about making your goal reasonable and achievable. While the general goal or resolution may seem large – “save $20,000 for a car in 12 months” – and daunting, but that’s not a bad thing. What might help such a goal look achievable is to break it down. Change a year-long goal into smaller monthly or weekly goals – “Save $3,000 in January” – to help you continue to make progress. As long as you are reaching these shorter goals, it can motivate you to keep your eyes on the prize and stay on task.

The other part is to not make a resolution that is not reasonable in the first place. For example, don’t set a goal of “save $20,000 for a car in 12 months” if you are only making $30,000 in a year. When you reach too high, it will be easy to not make progress and get frustrated. That means you will likely quit when frustration gets too high.

Make sure your resolution is relevant to your life. It is one thing if you are angry or passionate about something in the moment, but a fleeting and emotional resolution will fade away in the distance.

This is where you need the emotion to get fired up about the goal, but to make this stick, you have to look inside and consider the goal logically and whether it would be good for you in an objective way. It is one thing to be emotional about it, but with emotions waxing and waning, having good logical reasons for the goal or resolution will help you have the staying power to stay with your goal.

It is one thing to make a resolution that is specific, like “lose 30 pounds.” If it is a New Year’s resolution, it might be implied that you may want to lose 30 pounds in the calendar year. But when you are looking for accountability, it is always best to add the timetable as part of your specific goal.

In this case, write your goal as “lose 30 pounds in 2018” and adjust it to “lose 5 pounds in January.” Having a timetable or schedule will hold you accountable in smaller segments.  Like with the “Achievable” part of the goal, your timeline needs to be reasonable to where you can reach small mileposts along the way to keep up momentum. Push yourself, but don’t’ make it too hard that it ends up being unreachable.

What can help with goals, especially long-term ones, is to set shorter milepost goals and do a small “victory lap” when you meet a weekly or monthly goal. If your goal is to lose 3 pounds in January and you lose 3.5, have a dessert on February 1^st. If you wanted to save $5,000 in February and you save $5,600, buy yourself a little something fun. Don’t be afraid to celebrate to stay motivated.

A year is a long time. It can be very easy to fall short of your resolution over 12 months. Lots of things can happen in 12 months which can serve as obstacles or hindrances to reaching your goal. And those obstacles sometimes can affect us and frustrate us emotionally. When that happens, we may tend to fall off our program and process and miss a goal or resolution.

That can be a reason to stop working on your goal. Even if you fall off the horse, you should get back on. If you miss a monthly goal, dust yourself off and work on the next month. If you miss a yearly goal, analyze your goal and reset it for the next year. You don’t have to quit if you miss a goal; just stay the course, keep your focus and enjoy your journey of self-improvement.