It’s been a month since you’ve made your New Year’s resolutions. How are you doing with them? If you’ve fallen a bit off track or worse, never committed to the changes you wanted for the year, it’s not too late to start.
Some questions you can ask yourself:
- What can I do to reach my goals?
- Why haven’t I followed through?
- What excuses am I making?
- What can I do now to commit to my goals?
- Who can help me reach my goals?
- What worked ?
- What didn’t work?
Reassess Your Goals
Once you take a brutally honest look at yourself (pretend you are being critiqued by a gentle friend or relative), then you can decide what areas need improvement. Say you made a resolution to lose 20 pounds but dieted for 2 weeks and quit. How can that experience best serve you to recommit? Perhaps you need to reassess your goals. In this instance, perhaps dieting isn’t the answer. Try adding 20 minutes of exercise each day. Simpler methods to reach your goal will work better than a strict time frame or number goal on the scale. Taking past failures or setbacks and letting them continue to hold you back will never help you achieve that goal.
Shorten the Time Frame
Maybe you attempted to quit smoking or exercise more. And for a few weeks it worked but now you want to recommit and start over. Why not make a new WEEK’s resolution each Sunday night and commit to “stick with the program” for that 1 week? Then the next week, you can reassess what worked and what didn’t and do it again. Taking it one week at a time is much less intimidating and puts less pressure to meet the larger goal. We can all make changes for a short 7 days at a time.
Write it In
Another factor is writing your resolutions, or goals. Experts have said that when people write goals, they will likely achieve The old Harvard Goal Setting study that showed 3% of graduates going on to out earn the other 97% directly correlated with the writing of their goals. Isn’t that fascinating that simply putting your goals on paper, or on your smartphone notes or computer can make such a difference? Let’s say your resolution was to spend more time with family – why not actually schedule that in your calendar? Changes need to be concrete in some cases.
Whatever your resolutions were on the 1st of the year, there’s no reason you can’t make the 1st of each month a new time to commit to change. Write your goals, write what it takes to reach them, take it 1 week or 1 month at a time, and you can be sure to see major changes for the better!
