3 TIPS TO MAKE NEW YEARS' RESOLUTIONS THAT LAST

Never seem to keep your New Years’ resolutions? You’re certainly not alone. 

By setting realistic, simple goals and tracking your progress, you can finally make a New Years’ resolution that lasts. Here are our 3 tips to help your goals survive long-term.

Be Realistic

Setting realistic goals comes up a lot when talking about goal-setting. It’s a common mistake to set too lofty a goal, fail to achieve it, and throw the baby out with the bathwater. Setting realistic, achievable goals is key to making a New Years’ resolution that sticks. 

But, how do we determine what’s realistic and what’s not? After all, we know that we’re supposed to set realistic goals, yet we keep putting the stakes too high. Maybe it’s a matter of not knowing what realistic even means.

Look to your past to figure out what’s realistic for you. What went wrong when you failed to keep last year’s resolution? What patterns seem to prevent you from taking action? 

Setting realistic goals is a personal journey. 

You might be the type of person that requires external motivation. Therefore, you can stop beating yourself up when you find it hard to show up for yourself when no one’s watching.

Maybe you struggle to set boundaries between work and home life. Your agreeable personality might be the culprit. 

Getting to the bottom of why a goal is realistic -- or not, can help you sort out the best goals to set in the new year. It might get super deep, but that’s the point, right? Let’s commit to being more self-aware, figuring out our patterns, and setting goals from there. 

Keep It Simple

Another mistake we all seem to make time and time again is making our New Years’ resolutions way too complicated. We attempt to do a complete overhaul of our lives, trying to fix every lousy habit all at once. 

News Flash: That approach will never work. 

Instead, vow to keep your New Years’ resolution as simple as you can. Work on one bad habit you can change. 

Maybe you want to start exercising more and getting fit. Start by moving your body, in any way, at least once a day. Go for a walk. Do a sweaty kickboxing workout. Take the stairs or end the day with some stretching. 

It’ll be much easier to stick to your goal if you have a clear, simple focus. Trying to do too many things at once is bound to result in everything falling apart without anything changing.

Keep your New Years’ resolutions simple, and they’re more likely to last.

Track Your Progress

Finally, to see your progress, you have to track your progress. Sometimes, we think a resolution went to waste when there was some improvement after all. We simply failed to notice it. 

Change happens slowly and in small increments. Still, we expect to see massive changes overnight. The truth is, there aren’t any shortcuts to lasting change. 

Tracking our progress helps us stay motivated to keep up with our New Years’ resolutions and gives us benchmarks to celebrate our achievements. 

You can try using OOMPH to track your exercises, calories, heart rate, and more. Keep a journal of your meditation times or yoga practices. Start a monthly budget to see your savings account grow.

Tracking not only helps us see the successes but also to see what we need to work on. It’s ok if your New Years’ resolution gets tweaked here and there so long as the overall goal is concrete. 

Be realistic, keep it simple, and track your progress. You’ll be able to finally own your New Years’ resolution while building a lifelong habit along the way.