Reset Your Resolutions

1. Be realistic

You know your habits, your level of effort, your schedule, and your ultimate goals.

Don’t preemptively sabotage yourself by setting your bar too high or making your timelines for success too short. If you hit your goal in record time you can always set another.

2. Focus on incremental progress

Split your overall goal up into manageable steps or stages. The thought of reaching your goal’s 100% mark when you are at 3%, but feel that you should be further along, can be demoralizing.

However, if you split that 100% into 10 stages of 10%, 33% of the way to your first milestone is a pretty great start.

3. Stagger your starts

Did you resolve to exercise more, eat less and always be on time? Do your future success a favor and spread out your start dates. Don’t undermine your efforts by putting too much on your plate at once.

Feeling overwhelmed from the start leads some of us to scrap some, or sadly, all of our best intentions before you’ve made real progress.

4. Track your progress

Make a chart, a checklist, a bar/line graph, or that grid of squares you fill in with little stars every time you do a good job.

Keeping records of your progress, especially visual ones, can make your efforts more ‘real’ and meaningful. Motivation is key and one of the keys to staying motivated is recognizing that your efforts are making a difference and celebrating wins, big or small.

5. Re-evaluate as the year goes on.

It comes as no surprise that things can change dramatically as a year progresses.

With that in mind, take stock at regular intervals to revisit tip #1.

Is a new responsibility eating up the time you thought could be set aside to bring your resolutions into reality? Is financial strain causing you to cut corners?

Don’t be discouraged.

Keep your goals, but maybe re-evaluate your timeline. If you get burned out, you become more likely to quit, so don’t beat yourself up, just keep at it, knowing it might take you a bit longer to get there.