15 Tips for Creating a New Year’s Resolution That You Will Stick With

By Rawan Albina (@RawanAlbina)

According to a special story that Time magazine published on New Year’s resolutions at the beginning of 2011, here are the top 10 commonly broken New Year’s resolutions:

• Lose Weight and Get Fit
• Quit Smoking
• Learn Something New
• Eat Healthier and Diet
• Get Out of Debt and Save Money
• Spend More Time with Family & friends
• Travel to New Places
• Be Less Stressed
• Volunteer
• Enjoy life more

All these broken promises leave us dry which eventually lead us to feel guilty, blame ourselves, and that little voice in our head comes back to supposedly teach us a lesson and sabotage our efforts even more: “I just knew you would fail again!” “Did you seriously think you were going to do it this time around?” “Do you not know yourself at all?” Etc. Sounds familiar?

January 1^st marks a beginning and lucky for us, it comes back every 365 or 366 days. It gives us hope and feels like a brand new white page on which we can write anything we want. Often our hopes are so high that we tend to over-promise ourselves by setting quite ambitious goals. This is what New Year’s resolutions are: Goals.

The issue with goals is that they look great on the outside, and they make you feel good, but they are short-lived. It is like standing at the starting line of a long race and truly believing that you will win it without putting in all the hard work and training for it. So unless your New Year’s resolutions have a clear plan to back them up, you might stick to them in January but when February arrives they will become history.

Of course when we set our New Year’s resolutions we always have the best intentions for ourselves, the people around us and the world. Believing that our intentions are enough to make us follow through on our promises is an illusion. Your resolutions should be more than just hopeful promises filled with good intentions. You must connect intentions to passion because this is what will fuel your motivation in the long run. But most people do not know what their passion is and often set goals that will take care of the outside rather than resonate with them on a deeper level.

Here are my 15 tips on creating New Year’s resolutions closer to your heart which you are more likely to stick to:

1. Get to know yourself better: On a deeper level, understand your values, your passion, your dreams, and your aspirations & ambitions. This requires that you stop, think and find the answers. If you cannot do it on your own, hire a professional coach to help you.
2. Resolutions should be a reflection of who you are: Do not set a resolution because it will make you look good or because someone else thinks it is a good idea
3. Connect your resolution to something that has deep meaning for you: unless your motivation is rooted into something meaningful and deep, something you are passionate about, it will most likely be short-lived
4. Goals are a journey not only a destination: Make sure you have a process in place that allows you to follow through on these goals by having clearly defined action steps that will take you there
5. Take baby steps not giant leaps: Action steps should be achievable and measurable with clear milestones that can guide you to your destination and keep moving you forward
6. Make sure you celebrate your wins along the way: Every time you reach a milestone take some time out to celebrate it. This will give you the encouragement to keep going
7. Put yourself first: Say NO to temptations and to your saboteur. Temptations will always be there to make you stray-away from your path and that little voice in your head (your saboteur) will be making every effort to sabotage your journey. When your action-steps are rooted in passion and values, you stand in a powerful place.
8. Do not give yourself excuses: Of course you can be lenient and flexible with yourself but you can do that by giving yourself the choice and allowing yourself to take a break if you need it. This must be a conscious effort where there is no room for excuses. Excuses are just a decent way of admitting failure.
9. You need to be in control of your own process from beginning to end: All steps on this journey should be started and controlled only by you.
10. Create accountability: Share your process with a friend or a coach and make sure they hold you accountable every step of the way. When you are the only one who knows about your plan it will be easier to cheat your way out of it.
11. Any day of the year is a good day to set goals and make them happen: January 1^st has a way of putting pressure on you because this seems to be the starting point for most people on the planet. Your starting point can be any day you choose.
12. Have fun doing it: Enjoy the journey so that the destination can be a triumph on many different levels
13. Stop and re-assess: Allow yourself to stop and take stock along the way. If things are not working out for you it is ok. This does not mean you failed.
14. You can re-direct any time you choose: give yourself the freedom to change the goal if it seems too ambitious. Reaching a smaller milestone is always better than giving up
15. Whatever the outcome is just be sure to make yourself proud

Here is wishing you a successful 2012 with many proud moments and a lot of creativity and fun.

22^nd Issue – January 2012
Here We Start – Art of Living 101 – Beyond Inspiration
Blunders of a Wanna Be Entrepreneur – Community Talk – Scenes from Life
Sense and Sustainability – Too Blunt For Words – To The Point