How to keep your New Year’s resolutions

With 2020 now here, we wanted to check in with you about your New Year’s resolutions. No pressure! If you’re finding yourself flagging or unsure how to achieve your resolutions, we are here to help. Have a look below at our foolproof method of keeping your New Year’s resolutions.

Setting a goal
First things first, what do you actually want to achieve? There are a lot of usual suspects to consider, such as eating healthy, exercising more or getting organised. What is important to keep in mind is that your goal should motivate you. You should really want to achieve the goal you set yourself rather than feeling that you should achieve this goal. For instance, you might have been confronted with a lot of body negativity over the holidays and heard a lot of talk about losing “holiday weight”. But the last thing you want to do is sign up for an expensive gym subscription that you never use and then feel guilty about wasting money.

When setting your goal it is also key to stay realistic. New Year’s resolutions aren’t about radical change but about gradually changing your habits and creating new routines. Instead of creating a long list and setting yourself up for failure, select one or two areas to focus on.

Making a plan
Now that you have decided on your goal it’s time to put some thought into how you’re going to achieve it. It’s not just enough to write it down or create a vision board (as fun as it may be). A foolproof way to make the most out of your New Year’s resolutions is by writing them out as SMART goals. SMART stands for: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound. SMART goals are especially helpful when your goal is something vague like “live life to the fullest”.

Be about what you want from your resolution. In this case, what does it mean to you to live life to fullest? Is it spending less time at work, travelling more, spending more time with friends and family? Take some time to figure out what a success would be.

Make it measurable. Make sure that you can keep track of your progress, it will help you know where you are in your progress and give you a measure of success (which will hopefully help to motivate you).

Make sure that your resolution is attainable. If you immediately expect yourself to cook healthy every night and hit the gym every morning, you are going to have a bad time. Start with making a week menu or trying a new healthy recipe. You have all year to work on this and all changes start small.

Think about what changes are relevant. If you’re trying to spend more time on self-care, think about what that means and what would be relevant. Would going for a run after a hard day of work be more relevant to your overall goal than binging on Netflix?

Think about the time frame in which you want to work on your resolution. What can you do today that would help your journey? Where do you want to be six months from now?

Get support
It’s always good to get a bit of help when you’re trying to make a change in your life. There are plenty of ways to get support, depending on what you are trying to achieve. If you’re trying to get to the gym more, find a buddy – a sorrow shared is a sorrow halved. And in true 2020 fashion, don’t overlook your phone. Trying to read more? Get the Goodreads app. Taking more time for yourself? Download Headspace.

Stay positive
Most importantly, remember that all change is a process. Somedays you might splurge on a takeaway instead of making your weekly savings goal; you might cancel a gym class to go out for drinks instead. And that’s fine. Keep working on it and stay positive. See you in 2021!

Sally Wijers