How To Make New Year’s Resolutions You Can Stick To All Year

It’s the time of this time of the year when many of us begin to consider our New Year’s Resolutions. Sadly, only a small proportion of people who do this practice stick to their goals until the end of the year. From spring onwards, it becomes harder and harder, as unpredictable events of everyday life get in the way and this sometimes results in us giving up and feeling like failures. And so, another year passess by without us having the body of our dreams or the raise we wanted to ask for.

Although New Year’s resolutions are not part of my native culture, I have embraced this practice for three years now and indeed I have seen awesome results. But deciding and working on these objectives takes some skill and determination. I personally see my New Year’s resolution as a kind of project. I am writing this post based on my personal experience with New Year’s resolutions, which means that the advice I am providing here is based on what has and what hasn’t worked for me so far.

But first, let’s clarify what a New Year’s resolution is. According to Cambridge English Dictionary A New Year’s resolution is “a promise that a person makes to themselves to start doing something good or stop doing something bad on the first day of the year”, whereas Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the New Year’s resolution as “a promise to do something differently this year”. So, both definitions bring us to one conclusion: the purpose of a New Year’s resolution is to make a committment to ourselves that we will take some specific action to bring some positive result to our lives.

Here are some practical steps that can help you stay committed to your New Year’s resolutions every single year. I’m not a guru, but since the day I took the process seriously, I have become a different woman. Here are some steps that I advise you to take:

Begin by planning the day that you will devote on your New Year’s resolutions: A New Year’s resolution list having some potential is one which has been drafted carefully in a peaceful environment. Decide when this day will be. Turn on your favourite playlist, make your favorite beverage, light up a candle or two and get some nice pieces of stationery. Relax, focus, and take the process seriously.

Reflect on your last year’s resolutions: It is important to review your progress from last year. Have you achieved any of your goals? If yes, feel proud of yourself, you deserve it! If some of them are still in progress, don’t worry, you haven’t failed; just write them down for this year. Have you completely abandoned a resolution? Ask yourself why; if the answer is that you’ve lost interest, just move on without beating yourself up, because this might be a sign that your priorities have changed -which is OK and totally normal. The truth is, today we have learned to expect fast results with minimum effort in all sectors of life, and this has led us to putting the label “falure” on anything that hasn’t been achieved fast enough or effortlessly enough. Release yourself from this anxiety; some things take time and effort, on top of the daily setbacks that each of us has got to encounter.

Be prepared to spend a few days finalizing your list: A hasty list of New Year’s resolutions is a list that you will forget soon enough. You will place it in a drawer or on your kitchen counter and poof! It will disappear and you won’t even notice! Don’t let that happen, because this process is your oportunity to clear your mind and see your own needs. Instead, return to your list again and again, reflecting on and adjusting what you have written.

Make it specific but not too specific: In other words, make your goals flexible. For example, if you want to lose weight, avoid writing “lose 20 kilos”, because you are human and setbacks that are beyond your control will inevitably come your way (e.g. Easter holidays, work lunches, dinner parties, low motivation days and so many more). And what if you lose 18 kilos instead of 20? Will you feel that you failed?

Make it long but not too long: We have a whole 12 months ahead of us, which is enough for the achievement of a plethora of great things! But loading our list with dozens of microgoals isn’t very helpful, because we risk missing the big picture. Instead, try and categorize those small objectives under let’s say, five or ten bigger goals. Those small objectives can be the necessary steps for the achievement of your big resolutions, aka results!

Make it realistic and feasible: There is nothing more disappointing than realising that your goal was set to fail from the beginning! Unless you are a prodigy, you can’t earn a degree in a field you know nothing about within twelve months. And no, unless you do something really drastic, you can’t go down from size XXL to S within a year. It takes time, effort, and few consecutive New Year’s resolution lists. Take the necessary smaller steps each year and you’ll get there eventually.

Once it’s final, place it somewhere you can’t miss: It might be the notepad app on your smartphone, your pc to-do list, or a vision board. Personally, I maintain a digital vision board, to which I incorporate my New Year’s resolutions. This helps me see them as real goals and allows me to add text and online tools that will help me achieve the results I want. This way, I take real action and can add new helpful steps and delete those that don’t work throughout the year. There are tons of apps out there that can serve this purpose, yet my personal favorite is Padlet.

Start early: Obviously, this is a process that takes days and you don’t want to get stressed. On the first week of December, you should consider starting to make your first draft, so that by New Year’s Eve you’re set!

And there you have it: my strategy for a successful New Year’s resolution list. I hope it helps!