For many people, the start of a new year marks an opportunity to reflect on their lives and think about where they would like to be.
And while New Year resolutions may get a bad rap for encouraging unrealistic goals or placing pressure on us, they can also be a great starting point to prioritize your health and wellness on your terms.
Despite the best of intentions, once the glow of a fresh new year wears off, many people struggle to make good on their plans.
As we begin the new year, The Ghana Report looks at the ways that will make you a better person by the time 2025 comes around.
1. Mentally prepare for change
Changing ingrained habits is no easy task, so before diving head-first into your New Year goals, it is important to take a step back and get ready for that impending change.
The first breakthrough in change is taking a personal inventory. Being that it’s the end of one year and the beginning of the next, it’s perfect timing to take stock of the past year’s accomplishments. Think about the following:
- What did I set out to do in the past year?
- Where did I make progress?
- Where didn’t I see progress?
Naturally, your resolution may focus on areas that lack progress, but don’t forget to savour the progress made and find some small way to celebrate.
2. Set a goal that motivates you
You would be surprised how often people set goals that are not for themselves. These goals could be dictated to or coerced by a manager, spouse, or parental / peer pressure.
While it’s nice to have some external support, if you don’t share the same passion, the resolution has a small chance of succeeding and could even be dead on arrival.
To do this, you need to make sure the goal you set is important to you and only you and that there is value or benefit for you in achieving the goal. These two things will provide the reason and willingness to take action. This is also known as motivation!
Thus, it’s a safe bet if your resolutions align with the following:
- Your goals
- Your priorities
- Your dreams
- Your aspirations
3. Limit resolutions to a manageable amount
A common mistake in resolution-setting is having too many and spreading yourself too thin.
We all want to learn 25 different languages, 15 new job skills, and eliminate five bad habits, but we are not superheroes.
We only have so much attention span we can dedicate to self-improvement, so having too many resolutions is a great way not to achieve the many goals you have set out for yourself.
Thus, you should make a short list of resolutions you can manage in the upcoming year. Knowing that short list of priorities is the hard part. The key here is understanding how to prioritize.
4. Be specific
When it comes to setting resolutions, it’s easy to set bad goals that could lead to poor follow-through.
Fortunately, the SMART goal-setting framework can help you craft better goals.
SMART goals are:
- Specific – Articulate the resolution as clearly as possible. For example, quitting smoking is better than being healthy. While “being healthy” is great, the wording can be interpreted in many ways.
- Measurable – Quantify your resolution if possible, i.e., I will lose 10% of my body weight.
- Attainable – Choose a goal within the realm of possibility yet challenging. Making 100 friends this year would be amazing but probably pretty hard to do. On the other, making 10 new friends is doable.
- Relevant – Keep it relevant to your priorities and goals. See the motivation section above!
- Time-sensitive – Give yourself a time frame in which to achieve a goal. A deadline will instil some urgency and provide a time when you can celebrate your success.
5. Break up big goals into smaller goals
A lot of us tend to be over-eager and grandiose when it comes to resolutions. We have the best of intentions and may accidentally take on a goal that is too big to achieve.
Thus, it’s helpful to divide a big goal into smaller goals that are more achievable.
You can break up your year-long resolution into weekly or monthly goals. And have tasks planned for each month. For example, if you want to travel the world in 2024.
- January: West African countries
- March: Other African countries
- May: Europe
- July: Asia
- September: Africa
By breaking your tactical plan into discrete steps, you now have a pretty good chance of world domination by the end of the year.
Now chunking up a big goal is easier said than done. Here are a few tips to help you make your massive goal more achievable:
- Create a list of sub-tasks
- Prioritize and order them
- Use a visual map to display
- Assign milestones to each task
- Decide how much time each task requires
- Allocate resources accordingly
- Focus on the next step, not the big goal
6. Write down your goals
While it’s great to have goals, it is critical to document them in some way. Here are six reasons to write down your goals:
- They are easy to forget. While that may seem silly, we are human, and it is human to be easily distracted and forgetful.
- Writing down your resolutions helps you clarify what it is you want to achieve. It forces you to make decisions and be precise with your words.
- Writing establishes intention, but action needs to be taken to achieve your resolution. Having a written account of your goals is a constant reminder to take action.
- Written goals can act as a filter and guiding light for what opportunities to pursue. On any given day, there are a million decisions to make. When in doubt, refer to the goals you have set to dictate the way forward.
- Documented goals will help you overcome resistance to progress. We set goals to move forward, but there is a natural resistance to change. Your written goals spur you forward when you hit a speed bump or obstacle.
- Finally, written goals are a reminder of how far you have come and what you have achieved. It’s a nice feeling to look back at the end of next year and know your resolution has come to fruition. It’s a reason to crack open that bottle of champagne and celebrate.
If you need some help to set better goals and chalk out an effective, doable path to achieve them, we’ve got you covered with this easy and effective course on goal setting.
7. Share your resolutions with others
“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
It’s great to make a resolution for yourself and maybe even write it down, but if no one else knows about it, it’s easy to forget about or even ignore. And when you don’t achieve it, no one will notice or care.
On the flip side, your counterparts who decided to tell someone about their goal feel something different. Now that they’ve gone public with their goal, they feel a sense of obligation and accountability. Essentially, if you don’t follow through, they are going to let everyone down.
Crazy as it sounds, this sense of guilt is often more powerful than self-motivation. The upshot here is that when you do succeed, the people you share with will celebrate with you!
If you want to take goal sharing to the next level, you could organize a mastermind group. A mastermind group is a collection of highly motivated people who share a common goal and are looking to encourage and help each other improve.
8. Automate where possible
The good news is you probably have technology in your pocket that can help you follow through on your resolution – automation in the form of reminder apps.
Nowadays, there are a million different apps and services to help you follow through on your resolutions. These free tools can help provide a constant reminder:
- Google Calendar: Set a recurring meeting tied to your resolution, i.e. scheduling workout sessions at the gym.
- Google Now: Personal assistant that provides information as you need it.
- Reminders (on iOS): Set up timed alerts for tasks.
- Boomerang for Gmail: Schedule reminder emails to yourself (Freemium).
On top of these commonly used apps, there are also “to-do list” and task management apps that have the ability to schedule reminders and milestones.
9. Review your resolution regularly
Let’s face it, if you are not thinking about your resolution regularly, you are not going to follow through. Thus, a crucial part of realizing your goal is a regular review.
At a minimum, this review should be monthly, but the more frequent, the better.
Here’s one way to build goal review into your routine.
- Schedule a monthly “big picture” review during the first week of each month. This will serve as a planning meeting where you distribute smaller tasks and goals to different weeks throughout the month.
- Do a weekly check-in to check progress on the monthly goal.
- Set a daily reminder for smaller resolution tasks.
It may seem a little crazy to think about your resolution every single day, but it is those smaller incremental steps that lead to massive changes over the course of a single year.
10. If you fall off track, get back on quick
We’ve established it will take time for your resolution to become a reality, and we know change is difficult. In fact, we’ve already established we should leave some room for mistakes and setbacks.
Keep the following ideas in mind:
- Skipping an intermediate task is not a complete failure
- Missing a goal by 10% or even 80% is not a complete failure
- Finishing a task late is not a complete failure
- A moment of weakness is meaningless in the grand scheme of things
Setbacks can happen, but so long as they are handled correctly, they will not impact the big goal. The key is to avoid a defeatist attitude at all costs, i.e., “Well, I screwed up once, why should I even try to do this anymore.”