You’ve probably seen the memes and heard the jokes about New Year resolutions. It’s true to a great extent. Making promises to ourselves is easy, but keeping them is difficult. So then, are we doomed to disappointment? Or is there a way we can actually use new year resolutions to make our lives better for good?
In this blog, we share our best tips for making those resolutions stick to help you grow into a better person.
Set just one New Year’s resolution.
Write down your most important and urgent goal.
When you only have one resolution, you’ll find that it’s easier to stick with your plan because no other distractions or things are competing for your attention. You won’t get side-tracked even when other things come up. Also, if something comes up in life (like work or family responsibilities), it’ll be much easier for you to adjust your plans so that all the pieces still fit together into a cohesive whole rather than having multiple things going at once.
An online life coach in Australia can help you with the necessary support and guidance if you are looking for help in creating a life vision and choosing a goal that serves you.
Keep it small, tangible, and measurable.
Don’t try to do too much at once. Keep it small and tangible so that you can accomplish it without feeling overwhelmed by its magnitude. You don’t have to be the best person in the world, and you don’t have to do it all.
In his book Deep Work, Cal Newport suggests attaching ‘lead metrics’ with a goal. So if your goal is to write a book, a lead metric would be the number of words you should aim to write every day to meet the goal at a given deadline.
Rather than assessing your goals by the final outcome, you can proactively predict how things are moving ahead with the help of lead metrics.
Visualise the desired outcome.
If there’s a particular skill or attribute that you’d like to develop or improve in yourself, visualise what it will look like after you achieve it. Visualisation is a powerful technique used to manifest the desired outcome by placing yourself in a future scenario and getting familiar with how it makes you feel.
A life coach in Australia can help you with a guided visualisation exercise so you can get into the habit of doing it on your own.
Build a keystone habit to help you develop your daily routine.
In his New York Times best-seller, Habit, Charles Duhigg talks about the importance of a keystone habit and its ripple effect in creating a new lifestyle.
A keystone habit leads to other habits. For example, if you wake up early every day, it’s easier for you to go to bed early as well. It would also lead you to an early dinner, which, in turn, would have you shut off from work at a given time any evening. If you meditate every day, it becomes easier for you to get into the habit of exercising regularly or eating healthier food options.
Create an accountability system.
Let’s be honest. You may not find the support you need from your friends or family. But it’s not all their fault. They have other things going on for themselves and may not relate to your goals. It’s completely ok.
What you need, though, is an accountability system. If you have a parent, a friend, or a significant other, you can be accountable to, that’d be great. But if you can always try online forums and offline meet-ups with others who have similar goals as yours, that’s not working out. You can schedule time with them to make sure you’re doing what you said you would. You can meet up on certain days at the gym or after work every week and keep each other motivated.
Make sure you have some people in your corner to hype you up.
Schedule time for your goal.
It’s not working out because it’s not getting done.
It’s important to schedule time every day or week, even if it’s just 10 minutes at a time. Setting aside an hour or two every single day is going to be a lot more beneficial than scheduling it all on one day each week.
Use a journal to keep track of your progress and stay motivated.
Use a journal as a tool. Write down your progress. Write down how far you’ve come and how much progress you have made in meeting your goals. This will inspire you to keep going and not give up!
Don’t forget about gratitude.
It’s easy to forget about gratitude in the hustle of our routines, but thinking about things you’re grateful for can make an enormous difference in how you feel.
Gratitude has been shown to reduce stress and anxiety, improve mental health, increase positive emotions such as joy and love, increase resilience against trauma or tragedy (like the death of a loved one), boost self-esteem and self-worth, and enhance relationships with others.
To sum up…
In terms of new year’s resolutions, keeping things simple and organized is the most important thing. You can go from “doer” to “master of your life” when you set goals, tackle them with intention and build on the success of each one.
If you are feeling stuck or lost and the coming year has started feeling like just another year, consider seeking help. Working with an online life coach gives you the sounding board you need to sift through the multitude of feelings, biases, and challenges that are a vital part of starting anything new.
Schedule a free session with Quality Mind’s certified life coaches to get the best tools you need to level up your 2023.
