New Year's Resolution Wins: To Get Them, Start with How You Set Them

We’ve all been there. We start each year with the best of intentions about our New Year’s Resolutions. Perhaps we have decided that this is the year we are going to take off those extra pounds, start eating better, and regularly show up at the gym. We hit the ground running towards our desired healthier lifestyle on January 1st (okay, maybe the 2nd or 3rd day of the new year); however, at some point in January, February if we are lucky, we lose our momentum and return to those old habits.

Unfortunately, when we start straying from our New Year’s Resolutions, we often give up on them all together. We not only stop making progress towards our goals, but we may also feel disappointed in ourselves for not completing what we set out to achieve. It does not matter if a New Year’s Resolution is related to weight loss. This dynamic is at play with any focus of a New Year’s Resolution.

Some people are so fed up with the typical New Year’s Resolutions cycle that they stop making goals for the new year all together. Why even bother, right?

Many times, the main reason that New Year’s Resolutions are abandoned is because the resolution itself was too lofty or too vague right from the start. When we set resolutions at an excessively high level, we may feel defeated very early on our journey of change and give up on our goals prematurely. Similarly, when a New Year’s Resolution lacks clarity, we have difficulty tracking our actual progress. Both of these problems can be addressed at the New Year’s Resolution setting phase.

Setting New Year’s Resolutions can be a meaningful tradition. They represent a commitment to becoming a better version of ourselves. Change in general, and certainly self-improvement, can be hard though. We can prime ourselves for success with our desired changes for the new year by giving careful consideration to our goals.

Keep reading for my comprehensive strategy for positioning yourself for success when setting your New Year’s Resolutions for the coming year.

When we are not intentional with setting New Year’s Resolutions

A lack of intentionality and clarity when deciding upon New Year’s Resolutions can make it difficult to track our progress once we set out to achieve a desired goal. Other times, the issue can be that we set an unreasonable goal. Either way, we can feel disappointed about what appears to be a lack of progress and success and completely give up on our New Year’s Resolutions. What began as the best intentions for positive change ends with us back where we started and often feeling worse.

When we are intentional with setting New Year’s Resolutions

On the other hand, when we give careful consideration to our New Year’s Resolutions at the setting phase, we can set clear and reasonable goals for the coming year. When we are precise with what we want to change, we can better track progress. When we set reasonable goals, we can feel a sense of accomplishment that encourages us to proceed forward with our steps towards being better versions of ourselves.

New Year's Resolution Wins Start with How You Set Them

While it is true many of us have had mixed to little success with achieving New Year’s Resolutions in year’s past, that does not have to be the case this year. When you follow this comprehensive, step-by-step path, you will start to see that setting achievable goals that bring you closer to your ideal self is entirely possible.

Take a look at these next steps that can set you up for success with your New Year’s Resolutions this year.

1)     Start with the right mindset.

When deciding how we are going to become better versions of ourselves in the coming year, it is essential to be in the right frame of mind. A mindfulness meditation with a focus on grounding may be helpful here. If meditation is not your cup of tea, consider engaging in a preferred self-care activity prior to setting your New Year’s Resolutions. For example, taking a bubble bath or lighting a candle can help us set the tone for quiet contemplation.

2)     Get in tune with your values.

The next step to take when preparing to set New Year’s Resolutions is to get in tune with your values. This step is all about identifying those aspects of life that you find the most important. Examples of values include family, friends, love, honesty, success, creativity, and peace. These are just a few examples of the endless number of values one could hold. Values guide the choices we make in life. As such, we are more likely to achieve our goals when they are in alignment with what we value in life.

3)     Brain dump time.

Now that you are in the right frame of mind and in tune with your values, it’s time to brainstorm ideas that will bring you closer to the new and improved version of yourself. At this phase, we are just getting our ideas out and putting them down in writing. We are not judging these ideas for clarity or feasibility at this point. We will fine tune our New Year’s Resolutions for clearness and achievability in a later step. For now though, just let your ideas flow.

4)     Review your initial goals to see if they are SMART. Alright! By now you should have a very rough draft of your New Year’s Resolutions. The next step is to review those initial goals and see how they correspond to 5 tried and true criteria for setting achievable goals. We are going to judge our initial New Year’s Resolution ideas to see if they are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based. These 5 categories for setting achievable goals have been used for decades in the fields of business and psychology and are commonly referred to as SMART goals. The field of psychology loves our mnemonic devices!

5)     Be specific with your New Year’s Resolutions

The sky was the limit in the brain dump step, but now it is time to be specific and clear in how we word our New Year’s Resolutions. Consider brain dump generated goals like “be healthier” or “become a better person.” Both goals are certainly virtuous, but they are also nebulous. For the New Year’s Resolution of becoming healthier, a more precise goal would be to “exercise more.” One could make the “become a better person” goal less vague by including specific positive behaviors to increase. For example, “volunteer more” is a specific way one may choose to move towards the overarching goal of being a better person.

6)     Determine how you will measure progress on your New Year’s Resolutions

The next step in fine tuning New Year’s Resolutions is to decide how you will track your progress. In order to know if you are making progress on your New Year’s Resolutions, you need to have a way of measuring progress on these goals. Some New Year’s Resolutions start off with a more qualitative nature, but we need to quantify them in order to measure the changes we aim to make.

Let’s return to our “be healthier” New Year’s Resolution. The goal of exercising more can be measured by tracking the time spent exercising (e.g., how many hours or days) per week or month. The newly worded “be healthier” New Year’s Resolution with more specificity and measurability now reads as follows: “Increase exercise to 4 days per week.”

Now let’s take our “become a better person” New Year’s Resolution. We decided in the last step that the specific behavior to increase towards the overarching goal of being a better person is to “volunteer more.” Just like with exercise, one could track how much time is being spent volunteering each week or month. We could also measure how many different organizations for which we are volunteering over the course of the year.

7)     Make sure your New Year’s Resolutions are attainable

In this next step, the A of our SMART goals, we need to make sure we can reasonably attain our goals. Whether or not our New Year’s Resolutions are attainable depends on a few things.

First, and perhaps the most obvious, we need to determine if the New Year’s Resolution is even feasible to be completed in one year. Some resolutions may fall in the category of truly long-term goals like those involved in a 3-year or 5-year plan. If this is the case, we don’t need to abandon the goal as a New Year’s Resolution. What we can do is break the multi-year goal down to into smaller objectives. Even with New Year’s Resolutions that can be completed within one year, it may still help with progress to break it down into smaller components. The time-based section of our SMART goals has more information on goal breakdown.

Another factor to consider when assessing attainability of a New Year’s Resolution is the impact of current circumstances. If we are already under a great deal of stress or experiencing some sort of struggle, then it may be unreasonable to expect sweeping life changes. New Year’s Resolutions with a focus on self-care to improve resiliency may be more feasible in these sorts of situations.

A final matter to take into account when determining the attainability of a New Year’s Resolution is to make sure you have primary control over the outcome. For example, if a New Year’s Resolution is about a relationship goal, then it will involve another person. There is value in making shared resolutions, but we want to distinguish personal goals from couple goals or any goal that relies heavily on someone else when making our personal New Year’s Resolutions.

8)     Review your New Year’s Resolutions for relevance to your values

Here is where your prep work on values exploration comes back in the mix. Our New Year’s Resolutions are considered relevant when they align with our life values. We have more ease making changes when our goals are in alignment with what we value in life.

9)     Define timelines for completing your New Year’s Resolutions

The obvious timeline here is to complete your New Year’s Resolutions by the end of the new year. When reviewing whether or not a New Year’s Resolution idea was indeed attainable in tip 7, the first step was to make sure it was even feasible to be completed in one year. A year is a long time though, so some resolutions are better achieved by breaking them down into smaller components.

These smaller objectives are completed in a step-by-step fashion towards the longer-term type of New Year’s Resolutions. You will want to set specific dates of completion for the smaller goals to stay on track. Working on goals one step at a time helps us to not feel overwhelmed.

We can win at New Year’s Resolutions

Getting in the right mindset, tuning into our values, and ensuring our goals qualify as specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based can help us have New Year’s Resolution wins. By being intentional with setting our New Year’s Resolutions, we can truly set ourselves up for success with our desired positive changes for the coming year.

Setting our resolutions in an intentional manner is just the first phase though. Staying on track with them throughout the year will involve additional strategies. So, be on the lookout for an upcoming blog post with tips informed by psychological research to help you with forward movement on your thoughtfully set New Year’s Resolutions.

Dr. Jennifer McManus is a licensed psychologist who helps people with forward movement towards their life goals at the new year and all year long. If you think you may benefit from personalized and professional help with obstacles in the way of achieving your goals, please feel free to contact the psychotherapy practice of Dr. Jennifer McManus to learn more about available support. You can schedule a complimentary consultation, email, or call the office at 866-706-3665.