4 Tips to Help You Keep Your New Year's Resolutions

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Since we are officially several weeks into 2019, we have a question for you: how are your New Year’s resolutions coming along? Hopefully you’re doing great and moving right along in your goals and aspirations; but, if you’re like the majority of people, the first 30 days can be the most challenging.

In fact, according to an article by Forbes, only 25% of people stay committed to their goals after January, and only 8% of people actually accomplish their New Year’s resolutions by the end of the year. With stats like these, we know you likely need some motivation to keep working towards your resolutions.

To get you recentered and energized, check out our list of 4 Tips to Help You Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions below!

Break it Down

Often our New Year’s Resolutions can be quite lofty; common goals include losing weight, working out more, eating healthier, saving more money, etc. Too often we focus on the end result without thinking through how we will accomplish these resolutions.

To help set yourself up for success, start by breaking down your resolution into smaller, actionable steps. Not only does this give you action and direction to take, it also makes the goal, as a whole, more attainable.

For example, if your goal is to lose weight this year. Perhaps you start by breaking this down into two primary actions: eating healthier and working out consistently. Narrowing it down even further, perhaps you set an intention to drink a green smoothie for breakfast every morning to get your daily serving of fruits and veggies. You might also set a goal to workout or exercise for just 30 minutes a day. Doing both of these things will help you accomplish your goal of losing weight.

By breaking down your goals into specific, actionable steps, it’s easier to know how and where to start.

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Find The Time

Life is busy and it can be really hard to find the time to work on your resolutions. You have to make your resolutions a priority, just like work, school or other daily obligations are priorities that have to get done during the day. This means you may have to prioritize your goals over other things. Learn to say “yes” to things that serve you, like time spent bettering yourself and working on your resolutions, and “no” to obligations that don’t. Doing this will free up time in your schedule to work on your resolutions.

Not sure how or where to start? Perhaps start by setting aside a few hours on the weekend to work on your resolutions. Or, maybe you use your lunch break a few days a week to catch up on your own personal work. Schedule time for yourself to work on your goals!

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Find New Ways To Be Accountable

To stick to your resolutions, you need to be accountable. Ideally, you should be accountable to yourself and your own goal-making--afterall, you’re the one who decided what your New Year’s Resolution was going to be--however, sometimes it’s hard to hold yourself accountable if you’re the only one who knows what’s going on. As we’re now several weeks into the New Year, it’s time to bring in more people to help lift you up, cheer you on, and, yes, hold you accountable.

There are a lot of different ways to hold yourself accountable to your goals: make an announcement on social media (use peer pressure to your advantage -- it can be a strong motivator!), tell your friends and family, make it a game or a contest, put some money behind it, ask a friend if you can give them weekly or biweekly status updates, etc.

Whatever it is you decide to do, find a way to make yourself accountable to your resolutions.

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Be OK With Setbacks And Keep Restarting

When you’re working hard to change your habits and improve your lifestyle, it’s not going to be easy and it’s not going to happen overnight. You will have set backs (repeat: you will have set backs!), that’s okay and totally normal. Plan for the setbacks and know that it’s all part of the journey.

Instead of holding yourself to rigid parameters, give yourself some flexibility. If you worked on your resolutions for the first week of the year but have failed since, give yourself the permission to take a break and restart. Just because you had a lapse, doesn’t mean you should give up on the goal completely.

Take a second to reevaluate what happened to sidetrack you, recenter yourself, then get right back in it. No matter how many times you stop, the power is in the number of times you keep going. You’ve got this -- keep going!

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