How To Keep New Year’s Resolutions? 5 New Year’s Goal Setting Tips

If you want to understand how to keep new year’s resolutions, you’ll love this article.

The last day of the year (or the next few days) is the best time to check out the past 12 months and make New Year’s resolutions.

Some of us want to return to the gym; others decide to quit smoking or eat healthier and stop eating fast food, while others decide to save some cash. All these goals are noble, but many people normally give up in the first three months of the new year.

How do you stay with New Year’s resolutions? How to accomplish the desired goal? Here are some proven tips that will bring you much closer to success.

How To Keep New Year’s Resolutions?

1. Identify a selected and realistic goal that’s within your reach.

The most common New Year’s resolution is from the category of fitness and healthy lifestyle: I will start going to the gym.

What is your goal, and what do you mean by “going to the gym”? Running on a treadmill to improve your fitness? Strength training to enhance your muscles? Or pose in front of a mirror to take another picture on Instagram or Facebook?

Set yourself a selected and measurable goal – by August this year, I want to lose 40 pounds; this year, I will raise a barbell weighing 220 pounds; I will be so stretched that I will touch my head with my knees straightened out.

Don’t take on impossible achievements such as winning the national Crossfit championship (unless you’re a professional Crossfit player) or losing 50 pounds in 3 months. Unreal decisions not only quickly turn into defeats, but also effectively discourage you from fighting for your goals.

Once you’ve reached your goal, nothing stands in the way of setting your next goal. So as to prove to ourselves every day that there aren’t any impossible things for us. To become a better person and achieve more.

2. Regularly monitor your progress and set milestones

Once you have set yourself a goal, it is extremely important to set it within the set timeframe and keep an eye on it regularly. Milestones will help you to do this, and they’ll be very useful as a progress indicator.

Let’s take another popular resolution: quitting smoking. It is very difficult to quit right away, particularly when you’re currently smoking a whole pack of cigarettes during the day. If we want to quit smoking in 6 months fully, let’s plan three milestones: in the 1st, 3rd, and 5th month of the resolution.

The first milestone can be the reduction of cigarettes from 1 pack per day to 1 pack per 2 days. When we reach this goal, we build up a reduced need for nicotine in our body for the entire 1 and 2 months.

The second milestone should be another reduction to 1 packet per 4 days. This will be another visible success. Halfway through the decision, rather than burning 20 cigarettes a day, 5 is enough.

The last milestone will be a sprint to the finish line: complete quitting. For the last month, we have been ensuring that we have established new habits and don’t return to the situation before the decision.

3. Stay in touch with people with similar goals to yours

It is known that difficulties are easier to overcome in a group than alone. It is therefore worth finding neighbors, friends or colleagues who want to accomplish an identical goal. Mutual support in the pursuit of the desired finish, keeping an eye on one’s progress, or sharing advice will make it much harder for us to give up on our decision.

It would be a good idea to go to the gym and work together on your goals or to find a bistro with healthy food to replace fast food at lunchtime. This will quickly create a sense of community, which will inspire us, and in moments of weakness, we won’t be alone with our doubts.

At the same time, it’s worth ensuring that the atmosphere in the group is healthy, full of mutual support and respect. Let’s not allow for pinching, malicious comments, or devastating rivalry, which may ultimately turn into not only a failure of the goal but also ruin relations.

4. Get ready for crises and have a contingency plan

The road to the goal won’t be easy. From the very beginning, there will be difficulties and days when we will must overcome numerous problems and bad habits.

Of course, while a day off from the gym or a fast hot-dog at the station won’t ruin our decision, regular and frequent occurrence of this sort of “disorder” can have a catastrophic result.

So take care of an emergency program to help you stay on course (1). If we don’t want to go to today’s training, we can reschedule it and instead go to the swimming pool or go on a recreational bike.

Similarly to saving – if we decide to put aside 5 dollars a day and we don’t want to do so today, let’s put 6 dollars in the moneybox for the next week.

The worst thing you can do is to give up your decision or ignore the more and more often appearing weaker days when you don’t make the assumptions.

5. Ask a friend or family member to “supervise” your decisions

Although it seems senseless or even embarrassing to many people, it’s worth introducing a kind of “supervisor” into our goals. Such a person should know us well and, at the same time, be strong enough to point out our shortcomings without any scruples.

A good relationship is important for anticipating our weakest points, i.e., potential temptations and moments of weakness (2). Proper action in advance will allow us to diagnose crises and quickly neutralize them successfully.

A robust personality, on the other hand, is important to have the ability to say a few bitter words when the need arises. Ignorance of our character and habits can result the misreading of the signals and consequently, a worsening of our progress.

Too soft a character, on the other hand, may cause internal regret and a desire to withdraw from the role of “supervisor.”

Let us avoid choosing for such a role people with whom a powerful emotional bond binds us – otherwise, we may perceive their comments too painfully or, on the contrary, not take them seriously.

Summary

The time ahead will absolutely be conducive to settling our plans for last year and creating new resolutions.

Let us be sure that they don’t remain mere dreams, but that we regularly and systematically turn words into actions.

Thanks to these few easy tips, the desired effect will come easier and faster, and a concrete action plan will prove to be our invaluable ally.