5 Steps to Sticking to Your Resolutions

Have you kept your New Year’s Resolution this year? According to Days of the Year, January 17th is “Ditch New Years Resolution Day.” Other outlets claim it’s the second Friday in January. Either way you look at it, it’s commonly understood that many resolutions get quickly forgotten and dismissed by the end of January. In light of this recent holiday we thought it would be helpful to share our top five tried and true ways to stay committed to your goals this year, and beyond.

Adjust your mindset and begin to approach your resolutions as intentions.

Why intentions instead of resolutions? Megan Sullivan of In Mom Health puts it perfectly, “an Intention is a guiding principle for how you want to be.” 

Revisit your intentions and evaluate if they are still: 

• • • • Meaningful: Make sure you still value the intention that you set. Does it still align with the life you want to live? If it’s something you truly want to reach for, it makes it a lot easier to stay on course.
      • Attainable: All too often we reach for lofty goals or we try to attain everything all at once. Make sure your goals are realistic and measurable. Take it day by day so that you can track your progress. Small victories lead to great accomplishments.
      • Rewarding: Take a page out of Marie Kondo’s approach and make sure that your intention sparks joy. Sure, goals should be challenging, but the process and the outcome should make you feel happier and lighter.

If your intentions don’t satisfy our MAR test and they aren’t Meaningful, Attainable and Rewarding, you should let them go and move on. It’s okay to recognize that something isn’t right for you. Removing it from your list of intentions makes room for you to focus on the ones that actually work for you.

Breakdown your intentions into bite size pieces.

You can do this a couple different ways:

• • • Breakdown your intention into multiple steps. Create the necessary first step in achieving your goal and focus on that one thing. Once you’ve completed one step, you can then create your next step to keep you committed, motivated and organized.
      • • For example, you can take a big goal such as, “Get a new job” and adjust it to “Update my resume,” or “Sign up for a networking event.”
  • • Adjust your timeline from a yearly goal to weeks, or months, to make it more manageable. Yearly intentions can seem overwhelming which can lead you to give up.
      • • For example, you can change “I want to be healthy and fit this year,” to “I will commit to working out three times this week” or “I will eat more greens than carbs this each week.”

Stay accountable.

This can mean keeping a diary, using a checklist, tracking progress on a calendar, using an accountability app, creating a vision board or enlisting a buddy. I like to write my goals down and use a calendar to document my successes.

Be kind to yourself.

It’s inevitable that you’ll have setbacks. Recognize them when they happen, let it go and move on. Remember that every day is a new day and you can always reset yourself; you don’t need to wait until next year to try again.