There’s a lot of stigma around making New Year’s Resolutions. Depending on your personality, you may either love the idea of a fresh start and fresh energy as you come into a new year, or you may be more of a realist and completely dismiss the idea of making a bunch of resolutions that you know you’ll fail at achieving.
If making resolutions is your jam, we want to pass on some of our tricks of the trade for ensuring success in your goal setting. In this guide, we delve into creating resolutions that are not only inspiring but also attainable.
Setting the Stage for Success
Close your eyes and imagine the healthiest, happiest version of yourself. What does your life look like? Consider your life both at work and at home, both personal and with your family and other relationships.
Part of the issue with crafting attainable New Year’s Resolutions is all of the outside influence of what we think we need to be doing. Just because an influencer on Instagram or your boisterous auntie on Facebook are training for a half marathon this year doesn’t mean that is authentic to your lifestyle and goals in life. To authentically craft resolutions that bring you closer to the best version of you – you have to turn inwards and get real with yourself. What does the best version of you truly look like?
Be Honest With Yourself
The next thing you need to do when embarking on a fresh new year is look at the hard truths; where did you fall short this past year? Try to analyze your past year with zero judgment. At the end of the day we are all human, and we can only tackle so much at a time depending on what our internal and external environments will allow.
One popular exercise we like to do is completing a “Wheel of Life” worksheet that analyzes several different categories of your life. (Ex: Relationships, Financial, Personal Growth, Health, Spiritual, etc.) We would recommend basing your resolutions first on the areas where you feel you did the weakest in 2023. Hint: Google “Wheel of Life” and you will find several free worksheets you can download and complete.
Write Down Your Goals
Now that you have a vision for who you want to be, and you know the categories in which you fell short in 2023, you can create your overall goals for 2024. This is where applying the well-known principle of “SMART” goals is relevant. The more specific you can be when setting your resolutions, the more obvious and satisfying it will be when you reach them.
Example: Instead of “I want to be healthy” be more specific and say “I want 80% of my meals during the week to be healthy, and I want to exercise 3 times a week for 20 minutes to improve my health.”
Break Down Your Goals into Actionable Steps
Take your goals and think about what small, actionable steps it will take to make those goals happen. This is where the magic happens; we are coming up with those daily habits you’ll be incorporating into your lifestyle that actually move the needle forward.
Example: If your goal is “I want to eat 80% healthy meals during the week.” To eat healthy meals majority of the time, you’ll need to plan ahead and have the ingredients to make healthy meals at home. So your actionable steps will be to:
-meal plan every Sunday
-make a grocery list based on your meal plan
-go grocery shopping
-prep any foods for the week (ex. hard boil your eggs that you need for breakfast every day)
Set Deadlines for Your Goals
Lastly, decide what goals you want to accomplish by a certain time. (We like to break ours down by quarters/3-month chunks.) By spreading your goals throughout the year and giving yourself deadlines, you are increasing your chances of making them truly accessible and preventing “habit suicide.” Habit suicide is the concept of doing too many new habits at once, causing them to be overwhelming, and not sustainable for longterm success. After implementing the habits needed for achieving a particular goal for a whole quarter, you’ll find it becomes an easy habit to maintain going forward. That’s when you know you can successfully add in another habit for another category or goal.
Conclusion
As you embark on your journey of crafting New Year’s Resolutions, remember the power lies not only in the resolution itself but in the commitment and mindset you bring to the table. At the end of the day, a “resolution” or a goal is simply a destination – not an equation for happiness. Goals take repeated effort for a long time. You need habits to achieve a goal. Therefore, the point of the goal isn’t actually the goal. It’s the habits the goal motivates you to adopt.
Wishing you all the success and healthy habits for 2024!
