If you want to make successful New Year’s resolutions to help you meet a personal growth goal (e.g., lose weight), follow these seven steps.
People have been making New Year’s resolutions since ancient times. The first New Year’s resolutions were 4,000 years ago in ancient Babylonia.
Still, every year millions of people fail to follow through on them. For example, US News reports an 80 percent failure rate by mid-February.
To stay on track, stay motivated, and reach your goals follow these seven steps related to constructing and implementing your resolutions.
7 Steps to Successfully Fulfill Your New Year’s Resolutions
1. Be Realistic:
If you’re over-optimistic and set an unrealistically high goal, you’ll likely cause the New Year’s resolution to fail. Sadly these unrealistic expectations too often breed overconfidence and a cavalier indifference to potential challenges.
Resolutions, especially those you find yourself making repeatedly year after year, are too optimistic and hard to keep. The lesson is simple, if you continually fail, change the process of the goal.
Heed these signs and instead commit to smaller goals.
Alternatively, make a series of easier sequential resolutions where each represents a small step. Create benchmarks corresponding to each goal and celebrate the attainment of each as a success.
An added benefit to this approach is even if you don’t fulfill the entire sequence, you will have made progress. Then you can maintain the gain, and start from this point next year.
2. Create Positive, Clear, and Specific Resolutions
Achievable resolutions possess three key characteristics. They are:
- positive,
- clear, and
- specific.
When they meet these criteria, the end goal is clearer, charting the path to fulfillment is easier, and measuring progress is discernable.
Negative Goals – Kicking Bad Habits
Unfortunately, most resolutions are stated in the negative such as “I’ll stop eating ice cream,” or “I’ll stop staying up past 11:00 PM.” Negations such as these act as inhibitors. Plus they inherently translate into a loss or punishment.
Subsequently, and quite naturally, you feel the deprivation and pain, which makes your craving for what is withheld even stronger.
To remedy this disastrous progression, make your resolution positive and be clear and specific. For example, “I’ll go to bed at 10:00 PM so I’m rested and have more time in the morning and feel hurried and stressed.”
Energetic Alignment
Also, pay attention to and embrace opportunities that support your intention.
Energetically, intentions specified this way are more apt to entrain with supportive energy. In a way you co-create or draw on the “law of attraction.”
3. Create a Plan and How You’ll Monitor Progress
Make sure you create a basic implementation plan and monitoring mechanism.
To do this outline any steps you need to take to ensure your success.
Determine how you’ll monitor progress and celebrate successes.
Account for potential challenges that may arise and how you’ll overcome them. Consider what you may have to give up. And, identify what you could gain in its stead. For example, if you want to cut down on the time you spend online streaming shows, make a list of the enjoyable pastimes you’ve neglected due to indulgent streaming but will now resurrect.
Acknowledging and Expressing Gratitude For Progress
A growing body of research and literature suggests significant benefits arise when you acknowledge your accomplishments with expressions of gratitude. (Harvard Business Review, Psychology Today, Inc, Gambo).
Embracing success releases endorphins (reward hormones), boosts motivation, and galvanizes the change process. You release stress and anxiety and improve your mood and outlook. In turn, this fosters optimism, reinforces commitment, and sustains your progress toward success
4. Embody Your Desired Change
The actualization of intentions requires more than a simple statement of intent. Instead, galvanize them with the power and alignment of focus, embodiment, and commitment.
Being the Change You Want
Visualize and embody the results you want (see my blog for more on the importance of embodiment and embodied awareness. This is less about plans and action steps and more about being your desired result.
It might sound silly, but take on the posture, mindset, and shape of who you want to be. How you are on your inside and how you externally express this creates the biophysical and biochemical states and the neurological networks that correspond to that new desired way of being.
5. Create Rewards For Progress and Success
Milestones are akin to mini-resolutions that collectively or progressively fulfill your ultimate resolution.
When you find it difficult to let go of a particularly tenacious habit, rewards can be a significant motivation force, and make all the difference in your endurance.
In addition, these millstones are invaluable when the change process drags on slowly toward a painfully distant end goal.
6. Be Compassionate and Tolerant
Slip-ups should be anticipated but not preordained. You want to avoid them, but should they occur, show yourself tolerance and compassion. Judgment and strong self-reproach can bring the desired change process to a screeching halt upon the first infraction. Persistent shaming will lead to abandonment of the mission.
7. Get Support
You may feel you don’t want or need support. But, consider the benefits of support or mutual companioning.
Going it alone can be difficult. If nothing else, take time to reflect and decide who you can turn to for solace and commiseration when the going gets tough. In other words, create a contingency plan.
In sum, if you want to achieve and maintain your New Year’s resolutions take these seven steps for successful resolutions.
Make sure to design your plan before the Times Square ball drops.
For More On Setting and Fulfilling Successful New Year’s Resolutions, See:
- My Mind Body Spirit blog, especially:
- My spiritual life coaching sessions
Updated December 5th, 2024
