How To Keep Your New Year’s Resolution (Past January)

It’s late January, and you’ve made a commitment to improving a certain area of your life. It may be related to your health, your career, your spirituality, or even your relationships. These goals, often called New Year’s Resolutions, routinely drive our behavior, perhaps away from our decadent holiday eating/drinking habits and towards a new skill or hobby.

Although you set out for excellence full steam ahead, you may be struggling in maintaining your commitment coming into February.

Repeat after me. You are not alone.

We’ve seriously all been there.

The most difficult part (and the most important) is keeping your resolution, sticking through the initial momentum and into the year to actually form habits so your routines last.

Here are a few tips & tricks to making your New Year’s Resolutions stick:

1. Be clear about your goals and HOW you’ll achieve them. It’s tough to follow through with something that isn’t quite clear. Do you want to lose weight? Define how much. Did you want to learn guitar? Define how often you’ll practice.
2. Find your ‘why’. It’s always easier to achieve a goal if you have an understanding to why you’re doing it in the first place. Did you set an intention of a family game night once a week? Maybe it’s because you want to build a stronger relationship with your kids. Or maybe you chose to cut out processed sugar because you’re diabetic and want to maintain your health better. Regardless of what your goal is, referring back to your why helps motivate you to carry on.
3. Journal about your experience. Similar to remembering your ‘why’, journaling can help bring perspective into your journey. If you’re running each day, think about (and document) how do you feel when you do run versus how you feel when you skip a day. This practice can be helpful if you’re having a particularly difficult day and want to see how you were affected by actually carrying out your goal.
4. Find an accountability partner. Or a gym, or a like-minded group. One of the best ways to stay motivated is to surround yourself with people who support you. Whether it’s a friend, family member, or coworker, having that build-in accountability when you’re struggling should help you stay on track and maybe even have more fun.
5. Make mistakes, but don’t quit. If you slip up on your goal, don’t give up completely. Tomorrow is a new day and there are plenty of days ahead to make great choices. Just because you lost the battle, does not mean you lost the war.

Just know that it’s natural to sometimes struggle with consistency when you’re making big changes to your life. You should feel proud to have created an intention to make you or your loved ones lives better. Be sure to follow these tips to help keep you on track for reaching your goals during this new decade.