Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions
Will you keep your New Year’s resolutions this year? Apparently only 1/2 of Americans are making New Year’s Resolutions for 2022. Typically about 46% make New Year’s resolutions according to the American Psychological Association. It seems a large portion of the population has given up on making New Year’s resolutions because, in the end, they are hard to keep. So few want to fail so few will even try.
Get this. Only 8% will be successful in keeping their New Year’s resolutions. That’s it, just 8%. Will you be one of them? Now here is the good news. People who make resolutions are 10 times more likely to achieve their goals than those who do not explicitly make a resolution.
Most New Year’s resolutions revolve around health, relationships, and money. That’s not surprising.
The big challenge with keeping New Year’s resolutions is many people rely solely on willpower especially when it comes to thinks like losing weight and exercise, and willpower is only effective for 2 or 3 months. Something more is needed to get beyond 60 or 90 days.
Below are some tips to increase your odds of keeping the resolutions you make for 2022.
Tips to Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions
Making resolutions is basically the same as making goals and we have written about goal setting in our article titled, Goal Setting: How to Become More of the Best You.
- Write down your New Year’s Resolutions. Putting things down on paper increases the odds that you will succeed. Don’t type them, write them. There is something magical about writing things in your own handwriting. Studies show that students who write their notes as opposed to typing them, perform better on tests.
- Keep a list of your resolutions visible to remind you and help motivate you. Carry a piece of paper with you, post them to your refrigerator, put them on your bathroom mirror. It does not matter, just keep your goals and resolutions visible.
- Make a game plan. Now that you have a resolution, what steps must you take and in what order should you do them to achieve your goal? Write these steps down.
- Make your resolutions specific and have a target date for completion. Don’t say “I want to lose weight.” Rather say, ” I want to lose 20 pounds by March 31.”
- Resolutions should be measurable. If you can’t measure it, how do you know if you achieved it? This is common sense but commons sense is in short supply these days.
- Change your environment if necessary. If your goal is to quit drinking, don’t go to bars or associate with those who like to drink. This may require dissocating from some people.
- Be realistic and proceed towards your goal in a step-wise fashion. Focus on small incremental steps daily towards achievement of your resolution. I call this continuous improvement.
- Don’t beat yourself up if you take a step backwards as it is bound to happen. If you broke down and had a piece of chocolate move on it from realizing the next day will come tomorrow enabling you to get back on track. Many people once they fail, just entirely give up on keeping their resolutions altogether. Don’t be like that. Do not QUIT. I just read a quote on social media. “Don’t stop until you are proud of yourself.” What will make you proud?
- Have a contingency plan to overcome those moments you slip up or to overcome an obstacle standing in your way.
- Share your resolutions with someone that can help keep you accountable and support you when the “going gets tough”.
- Focus on one change at a time. Changing one habit is hard enough, let alone three or four simultaneously.
- Always, always keep the reward in front of you. Imagine how good you feel, or look, or how much at peace you will have once you achieve your goal.
We wish you the very best for a healthy and safe 2022!
