Achieving Your New Year's Goals
Tips that Will Help You Keep Your New Year's Resolutions
These simple tips and strategies can help you succeed at losing weight, getting out of debt, and saving money this year.
If you are despondent about a history of broken New Year's promises, or desperate to discover ways to make your resolutions work this year, try these strategies for achieving your New Year's goals.
Alan Marlatt, director of the University of Washington's Addictive Behaviors Research Center suggests that confidence and commitment play key roles in succeeding where New Year’s resolutions are concerned.
Give Your New Year’s Resolutions Some Serious Thought
Convince yourself that you mean business by taking some time to really think about what you want to accomplish. Get a notebook and put together a plan. Instead of jotting down items in a list, write a number of pages on each goal, outlining why you want to change your behavior, how you will gauge your success, what strategies you might employ to get you there, and setting a realistic timeline.
Be Specific About Your Resolutions
If your goal is to reduce your debt, analyze your finances and come up with a battle plan that you can employ to make that happen. It might involve eating out less, or cutting back on some of the services you receive. The more specific you are, the easier it will be to measure your success. A little success along the way gives you a big incentive to stay with your plan.
Establish a Timeline for Achieving Your Goals
Create a timeline. This will help you track your progress visually. It's a little like crossing items off a grocery list; the more items you cross off, the more you realize how close you are to being finished. Display your timeline where you can refer to it often, and update it as you move from month to month.
Make Sure to Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions Flexible
Your aim here is to have specific goals that you can track accurately, but make them flexible enough to keep them achievable. If you are trying to lose weight and you backslide for weekend, an inflexible approach puts you at risk for giving up completely.
This has probably happened to you before. For the first couple of weeks you have a lot of conviction and energy for staying with your New Year’s resolutions, then something happens to discourage you and you give up. This time, plan for setbacks. Allow yourself a few opportunities to fall short. If you are realistic and deal with setbacks as part of the process of achieving your goals, you are more likely to succeed.
Reduce the Number of Items on Your List of Resolutions
Rome wasn't built in a day, and you are not going to be able to change your life overnight. Once you have your list of New Year’s resolutions prepared and have outlined your strategies, prioritize the items on your list and eliminate 30% or more. When April rolls around, take your list out again and revisit those items you haven't addressed yet.
Give your New Year's resolutions a good chance of success this year by making a serious, reasonable, and flexible plan for achieving them.
