Making New Year’s Resolutions Happen

photo credit: lamazone

One of the challenges of New Year’s resolutions is keeping them. There are a few simple but valuable strategies I’d like to share here that make it easier to stick to New Year resolutions and to learn how to set better goals for the future.

Setting goals and thinking BIG about the future are qualities that we ought to embrace in ourselves. After all, it is no trivial task to mix the power of our imagination with positive attributes like hope and enthusiasm when looking towards the future. However, most people make three simple mistakes that can lead to disappointment when setting new goals: 1) forgetting to believe in one’s ability to achieve a goal 2) expecting too much, all at once and 3) treating goals like ideas rather than plans.

In this article, we’ll tackle each of these three potential pitfalls when aiming to achieve resolutions and life goals. By examining what makes for effective goal setting, we’ll establish a 3-step criteria for achieving each New Year’s resolution that you have set for the year ahead.

Goal Setting Tips

1. Don’t be an alpaca – jump into action!

What’s the first thing that we think about when considering the word “goal”? It’s something that we mentally put in the future, isn’t it? It is a plan for tomorrow, next week or next month. The problem with this thinking is that we can easily fall into alpaca-mode, where we re-adopt our old habits, and never get around to achieving our set goals – wandering around like an alpaca in a field who avoids venturing forth into new terrain.

Let’s try an experiment in attitude. What qualities do most people think of when they think of a lion? Lions have, in the past, been associated with qualities of strength, courage and fearlessness, for example. What others can you think of? When planning goals and resolutions it is absolutely critical that you develop an attitude reflective of qualities just like these.

Believing in yourself and having a clear picture of what you want to achieve is 50% of the secret to effective goal setting.

photo credit: Tony the Misfit

Don’t be afraid of setting goals and dreams for the future that are big, it’s important to be unafraid of exploring the unknown. Sitting down in a quite room for 10 minutes and reflecting on whether you truly and ultimately believe in yourself and your ability to achieve your goal can be an especially useful exercise in goal setting. Once your attitude and your heart are both aligned with your intention for your goal-setting, that’s half of the work done right there!

2. Plan to achieve ALL of your dreams, at a realistic pace

On that first point, by the way, it’s perfectly fine to dream big; but sometimes it’s easy to get carried away. Sometimes it’s easy to expect too much of ourselves, and to expect all of our dreams to come to fruition within a few weeks or months.

“You can’t have a plan for your day, ’til you have a plan for your life.” – Anthony Robbins

Some of the most successful people have worked towards their goals in small increments – having a 5 or 10 year plan – for example. Self help guru Anthony Robbins once said that most people overestimated what they can achieve in one year and underestimate what they can achieve in 10 years time (paraphrased from seminar).

There are two points I’d like to make on this: 1) setting sub-goals can be essential to achieving larger more fulfilling goals and 2) the importance of not getting discouraged when goals take longer that expected to achieve.

First of all, Rome wasn’t built in a day, as the old adage goes. Likewise, people who can handle an intense 90 minute workout session didn’t just decide to go to the gym one day after months of not exercising. The wisdom in this lies in starting small and building upwards. Even the tallest towards start with the first stone. Sometimes it can be tempting to stop striving towards goals when you don’t see results right away. It’s important to continue pushing forward and to never give up, especially with important goals, because each time you give up on something you really really want, you unconsciously lose a bit of faith in yourself and your ability to achieve your dreams. Never give up on what you truly desire. Do keep in mind that some goals require proper planning though:

3. SMART goals are good goals

Follow your heart when creating new goals for the future, but create a methodical approach for achieving those goals with your logical mind. Once you truly know what you want to achieve and believe that you can and will achieve this, the next step is writing down a SMART goal.

SMART goals are goals which are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-based. I highly recommend learning the SMART goal system to convert dreams and ideas into measurable and attainable outcomes. This is one of the most effective approaches that I have learned for sticking to goals and monitoring changes (no matter how small they might seem at the start).

Other tips:

Most of the goals that I’ve set in the past have been successful when I have done the following:

- Having written the goal down on a piece of paper
- Imagined what things would be like when I have achieved the goals – a little trick from NLP on future pacing and painting the future
- Specified the exact parameters of the goal and how I will know when I have achieved it
- Not being too hard on myself when I haven’t achieved the goal on time
- Splitting the goal into sub-tasks

New Year’s resolutions around the world

I found a recent blog post about the most often ditched New Year’s resolutions. Have a quick look at some of these “goals” and consider whether they have been written in a way that is SMART. Consider the example “Enjoy life more”. How could you re-write a goal like this into a SMART goal?

Some creative New Year’s resolutions for 2012 were also presented at “Freshly Vegetarian”, where the author suggests some ideas for going vegetarian as a New Year’s resolution, with some recipes to start with. A blog post from “600words” also talked about the importance of finding an authentic intention when setting health-oriented resolutions.

More effective goal setting tips can also be found at “The Savvy Freelancer” which talks about setting effective goals career-wise. I also really liked this quick and to-the-point motivational post from “Big Success”. And some more tips from Karen of “Stream of Consciousness SEO” can also be found here. The “Soul Thumping Blog” also reminds us to start small when making New Year’s resolutions. Additional tips can also be found at Kim Garst’s blog about the secrets of keeping New Year’s resolutions. Finally, another great article about the four essential elements of keeping New Year’s resolutions can be found at Laura Schenck’s blog about counselling and psychology.