Making, Keeping, and Breaking New Year's Resolutions
Updated: Mar 1, 2022
Each year, January marks new beginnings for people all around the globe. Each year, these people set New Year’s resolutions for themselves, and sadly, each year, most resolutions don’t get completed successfully. Goal setting is quite easy - maybe you want to drink more water. Go to the gym a couple times a week? Read a few books throughout the year? Whatever it may be, goal setting is simple, but keeping these goals and following through with them is a whole different story. Research from the University of Scranton suggests that only 8% of Americans achieve their New Year's resolutions. Here’s how:
Make it specific and tangible
When the goals you set are abstract, not specific, and don’t have any details attached to them, that makes it that much harder to have a sense of achievement when you’ve completed it. Ambiguous goals, while easier to set, can lead to ambiguity about whether you've actually accomplished them, and can lead to lowered motivation to complete them. For example, instead of saying “I’m going to go to the gym more” you could say “I’m going to go to the gym at least twice a week for the entire month of January”. This way, there’s no uncertainty about if you went to the gym enough, and what the timeline is for completing it.
Set your goal with someone else
Having a buddy with a shared New Year’s resolution comes with so many benefits. When you do this, you have someone to hold you accountable during the process. If you set a goal all by yourself and start to slip up a bit, it’s much easier to let yourself do that as compared to if there was someone there to keep you on track. Having a person there alongside you also makes the process that much more exciting! It’s definitely something to look forward to other than your everyday life.
Have a plan
You can try approaching your New Year's resolution without any strategy or plan to achieve it, but you may not make it very far. Being excited and ambitious about your goals and reaching them is great, but taking time to first set up a game plan for the process it’s going to take to accomplish them is important to achieve success. Some things you might need to consider are: Do I need any physical things to complete this goal that I need to go get? How do I fit this resolution into my schedule with work, school, etc.? How long do I anticipate this to take? How am I going to reward myself after I’ve completed it?
Overall, New Year's resolutions are a fantastic way to kickstart the year ahead. Find something that you really care about and get it done! After the past two years we’ve had with COVID-19 being the main focus, I think that setting a New Year’s resolution for 2022 is the perfect way to keep distracted while the world (hopefully) gradually makes it’s return back to normal.
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