How to Stay Consistent and Committed to Your New Year’s Resolutions

We’ve all been there. It’s New Year’s again. Time for another resolution. We know we’ve eaten too much over the holiday and losing weight and getting healthy feels natural, but the last few years, we’ve set that goal and never stuck to it. What’s the point of setting that goal again? We look around at our house that is an absolute disaster and we think! “Yes, I will make getting organized my resolution,” only one day into organization, our kids run through the house like a tornado leaving messes everywhere and we decide that getting organized right now is a losing battle. Once we understand that our resolutions MUST be both inspiring enough and obtainable enough, we are on our way to finding the PERFECT New Year’s resolution! Just remember, the entire point of New Year’s resolutions is about personal growth. 

MAKE IT PERSONAL

Forget what everyone on social media is doing this year for their New Year’s resolutions! Seriously! FORGET IT! Put your phone down! Google’s definition of resolution is “a firm decision to do or not do something.” and “the quality of being determined.” Whatever resolution you choose, you should be firm in your decision and feel determined. That means that you have the emotional energy to back and follow through on your goal. I would not set a goal of exercising in the way that mainstream exercises because I absolutely HATE the gym. The noise, the chaos, everyone watching me while I’m “working out.” No thanks! That’s not for me! If I set exercising based on what mainstream does, I’d go to the gym a couple times and quit. There’s simply no determination there for me. Zip! However, if I set a goal to do more world building on the book series I’ve been working on, I would easily feel determined to work on this and stick with it. It’s personal! And FROM setting this resolution, I am learning how to set and keep my goals. And those FEELINGS of being consistent and committed will help me to emotionally UNDERSTAND what it means to set and keep a resolution! 

UNDERSTAND YOUR TRUE RESOLUTION

Let’s say YOUR resolution is to meal plan. Maybe you work out of your house and by the time you get home from work it’s late and the last thing you want to do is prepare and make a meal from scratch. Instead, you want to set aside Sunday afternoons to meal plan for the week so that every day you can come home and reach for a pre-planned meal that you can simply warm up. Your ultimate resolution isn’t meal planning at all, but rather manageable meals after a hard day’s work! As you feel the late night meal planning and cooking, this feeling of exhaustion acts as your motivator to commit to your Sunday meal planning resolution. It’s the feeling of exhaustion that should propel your ability to be consistent with this resolution. Once we understand this process and become clear about THE resolution we want to set, it goes a long way in helping us follow through! 

SET YOURSELF UP FOR SUCCESS

Being realistic is KEY to success when it comes to New Year’s resolutions. If you are new to New Year’s resolutions or new to actually following through on one, then it is crucial that you understand that NOTHING will change if you make the resolution too hard for yourself to achieve. If you set the bar too high you ARE going to fail! If you are new to this, find something achievable. Build momentum. Instead of setting a long term goal, consider setting a very short term goal. And if goal setting and achieving is something that you really struggle with, consider making the goal something that you are naturally motivated to. Let’s say that you love kayaking. Where you live, the lakes aren’t going to be freezing over soon, LOL, and something you’ve been dying to do is to kayak at the lake by your new house. Open up your calendar, pick a day that works and set the goal. Then when the day comes, pack up your kayaking gear and get on your way! While this goal is something you would have done anyway, the simple act of SETTING it as a goal helps your brain understand goal setting and little by little it will shift to the idea of “set a goal, achieve a goal,” line of thinking which will help you with future resolution making! 

UNDERSTANDING VISION, GOALS & OBJECTIVES

Something else to consider is strategy. Big corporations are excellent strategists. They have a new product they want to roll out, they’ve reflected on the best time to release this product, they’ve considered their best marketing strategy and put that marketing strategy into motion LONG before they launch the new item. This is because excellent strategists understand the idea of VISION, GOALS & OBJECTIVES. The vision comes first. This is our inspiration. We see this amazing, shiny, sparkly idea. We are instantly inspired and this inspiration is what we will USE to motivate us to achieve our future goals and objectives. Our goals are the steps we set to manifest the vision we have. Goals are the BIG steps like the creating of the new item, the marketing campaign, etc. And objectives are the tiny details that are actually the OBTAINABLE steps along the way. The objectives are what make the vision (or resolution) achievable to begin with. If I start with a vision and seek to immediately jump to achieving without understanding this process of vision, goals and objectives, what will happen is I will come across larger than life steps and instantly become overwhelmed and quit by default. This is why it is critical to understand HOW to achieve a resolution BEFORE beginning! Vision: Big idea. Goals: Big steps to achieve the vision (designing the product, marketing campaign, etc). Objectives: Secure the location to create the product, sign up for Canva to create the promotional material, come up with a name for the product). Resolution achievement is found with a step by step process or in some cases a multi-step by step process (there are steps for our goals and then steps for our objectives) and we map out these steps before we begin so that we have a plan to follow!

HOW TO ACHIEVE A RESOLUTION

So, before you even begin to try to achieve your New Year’s resolution, I want you to devise a plan. Ask yourself HOW you will achieve your resolution. Let’s say that your New Year’s resolution is to learn coding and SEO for your online business. While you love running your online business, you HATE all things technical and so finding the motivation to research coding and SEO, watch videos and read blogs on the subject and implement what you learn feels dreadful and so you put it off. As a result, your business stays stagnant and you know that if you truly want to build your business, you will HAVE to motivate yourself somehow to learn this boring stuff. Then you think, “I can set this as my New Year’s resolution!” So now you have a date of when you need to begin learning this stuff. Now what? Think about the parts of researching coding and SEO that you hate the most. Reflect on where your biggest resistances are. Maybe you are afraid to enter new territory? Maybe you are overwhelmed by the learning curve? Maybe you have no idea where to start? Let’s say that in this example, you take all stress off of yourself and enroll in a course instead. This means that your ONLY goal becomes enrolling in a course. Instead of trying to go it alone, you put your trust in someone else who knows more than you do on this subject and you simply show up to the course with notebook and pen in hand ready to learn? Then when the course starts, your notes will act as your guide to set your goals and objectives. The person you are putting your trust in becomes the person who TELLS you what your goals and objectives should be . Can you see how much easier this is? A big reason that people do not follow through and achieve their New Year’s resolutions is because of fear and resistance. 

UNDERSTANDING THAT FEAR IS NORMAL WHEN WE TRY SOMETHING NEW

If we can enter into our New Year’s resolution with the understanding that fear may very well be a part of the process, we will become more likely to achieve our resolution. If we enlist the support of others like with the case of enrolling in a course, we do not have to go it alone and therefore our fears will likely be more manageable. And I get it, sometimes we don’t enroll in the course because we have social anxiety and the overwhelm of our social anxiety is worse than the fears associated with learning new things! There are pre-recorded courses you can take where you can still have the support without having to engage socially! Some people say that fear is False Expectations Appearing Real. When we think about it, what is fear? Fear is the unknown. What we fear most is what we don’t know, what we haven’t experienced yet, what we are unsure about. But desire is fear’s opposite, so if we have a genuine desire for our New Year’s resolution, then we only have two choices: 1. Confront our fears or 2. Stay where we are. 

THE COURAGE TO CONFRONT OUR FEARS

Everything that we want is on the other side of our fears, right? Isn’t that the saying? Jack Canfield was not wrong. Think about everything that you were once afraid of that you are no longer afraid of. How did you arrive at the place you’re at now where you no longer have a fear of that thing? If you were afraid of the water, you overcame your fear by either learning to swim or engaging with the water in some way that you came to see that water was not something to fear as you once believed. Maybe you had a fear of dogs, but then your child loved dogs so much that you had to either disappoint your child forever or face your fears and after you end up loving the dog more than your child! Yes, there are some fears and phobias that desensitization ends up being more traumatizing for, but we are talking about New Year’s resolutions and something that you’ve already declared you WANT! Your desire for that resolution should be high enough that you feel motivated to confront your fears on this subject to achieve your resolution. If your desire is not this high, then the work to be done is gaining insight into why your desire does not match your resolution. 

SET A REALISTIC TIME LINE FOR YOUR RESOLUTION

We often think that when we set a New Year’s resolution we have to complete it by the end of January. I want to remind you that there are 12 months in 2024. And just because you set a New Year’s resolution in 2024 does not mean that it has to be completed before 2025! Ok, if you want to achieve your kayaking goal, shoot for achieving this by December 2024, but if you are trying to learn coding and SEO, remember that coding is a degree program at several universities! And the average degree program is between 2 and 4 years! Some subjects take longer to understand and grasp than others! Just because something takes you more than a month or year to learn does not mean that it is unobtainable! This is why the goals and objectives are so important! If taking an SEO course is one goal, realize that there will be many goals that follow the course which may include taking ten or twenty more courses before you gain even basic understanding on the subject! This is why I suggested making the course the New Year’s resolution rather than learning SEO. Can you see how the former is achievable whereas the latter has massive room for failure? 

SEEK OUT SUPPORT

Some New Year’s resolutions can be achieved on our own. When I set a goal for myself to organize my house, for example, I really do not want anyone else under foot while I am doing this. Something about going through each room on my own is therapeutic. But when it comes to learning SEO, I need all the support I can get! Understanding ourselves and our needs will be the defining factor as to whether or not we achieve our New Year’s resolution. So where needed, seek out support! Don’t be afraid to ask for help! We can still achieve our New Year’s resolutions WITH help! 

WHATEVER YOU CHOOSE, CONSISTENCY AND COMMITMENT ARE KEY

Slow and steady wins the race, right? Algorithms demand our consistency. Without our consistency, they believe we have quit. They have no understanding that we have lives, that it’s the holiday season and we may not be able to post every day or even three times a week. AI does not care about our personal lives, they only care about our consistency! Looking at your New Year’s resolution like AI may prove helpful. To achieve your goal, you will have to be consistent. You’ll have to make a commitment to a particular schedule so that your AI will believe your seriousness! I get it’s a lot of pressure. It’s also like having a life coach with you at all times checking in and giving you immediate feedback. This is why from the beginning I said that if you want to achieve your New Year’s resolution to make it personal! There’s good pressure and bad pressure. I mostly ignore the AI algorithm because I understand my life and my needs and am not one of these blogging empires trying to take over the internet in under a year. My goals for my blog are very different and so I can blog at my own pace and accept the ebbing and flowing of stats, but I appreciate the feedback which at least tells me if I am reaching the right people and creating helpful content. Results happen as we are consistent and committed. While the results might be tiny and we may feel like we are getting nowhere, one new insight learned, one more meal prepared, one more recipe added will eventually add up to big growth! 

CHOOSE SOMETHING MEANINGFUL

So, choose something that is meaningful to you; something that you will have the motivation and desire to be consistent at and committed to and then move at your own pace. I do not care what so in so is doing with their resolutions on the internet. You just keep putting one foot in front of the other at your own pace and I promise you that you will get where you want to go. If you truly want to achieve your New Year’s resolution, you will in your own time! If you end up jumping ship halfway through because you weren’t motivated enough, note that as well! You did not fail, instead you came to realize that what you thought you were mega motivated in, you just weren’t. That’s progress too! Then use that feedback to help you find what you ARE motivated by! 

Much love!