How To Keep New Years Resolutions

They're something we make every year and are quite often broken by the time we hit February. In fact, an article from Forbes suggests that just 8% of people keep their New Years Resolutions and manage to achieve them. It's easy to scream out "New Year, New Me" on January 1st but the real work has to start then too alongside an honest dedication to your goals.

Long term followers of my blog (hi, Mum) will know that I set myself some pretty specific 2015 New Years Resolutions this time last year and I'm delighted to confirm that I kept and achieved all six of these goals. You can read more about my progress on these in this post from Tuesday. I truly believe that the only reason I was successful with these resolutions versus every other year I've made them is because I was so specific with the goals. They weren't vague like my 2014 resolutions or easy to procrastinate on. They were very specific as well as published on a publicly available domain too. This meant there was an element of pride attached to achieving these as no-one likes to publicly fail.

The Forbes article from above agrees with this sentiment, stating that New Years Resolutions should be 'tangible'. There has to be a way to measure it.  If it's to lose weight, you need to commit to losing a certain amount and measure this through a scale. If it's to fit into a smaller size of clothing, be specific with how small that size should be and measure this with a tape measure and some kind of log. All six of my resolutions were designed to be very specific. I turned "drink more water" into "drink at least 2L of water a day" for example.

These resolutions have to be achievable too, which means being realistic with yourself. I could have set myself an ambitious goal of 10 blog posts a month, but that would only have set me up for failure. If I fail at something, I know its very easy for me to throw in the towel on all of it so setting realistic/achievable goals was very important to me.

Finally, I think the biggest help in sticking to these goals was to regularly check in with myself. At the end of each month, I would check myself and my progress against the goals I had set. I'd look at my weight records, my savings etc and review the progress I'd made with these as well as my daily water/reading goals too. If I could see room for improvement, it was a lot easier to pick up the slack at the end of each month rather than trying to do a rush job in November. It's a lot like keeping on top of doing the dishes each day. If you do them on the day, it takes 10 minutes vs a half hour job if you leave them for a few days. Just be honest with yourself and your progress along the way and it's easy to keep up with your goals.

I hope that this post helps some of you when it comes to setting your goals for the new year. I'll have a separate post going up today with my 2016 goals. In the meantime, I recommend this motivational video to inspire you when you need it:

Have a wonderful and fortune filled 2016 <3

Tabitha
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