The year is coming to a close. You start to reflect on what you should have done more of, what habits you should have developed, or should have broken. You think back to January when you were doing so well, but somewhere in the process life got in the way and all of a sudden you were no longer making any progress. That gym membership was going to waste, you’re still smoking or drinking too much, your relationships with family and friends aren’t any better. You think to yourself, “Why do I always do this? Why can I never achieve my New Years resolutions?” This is the common pitfall of the ideology of the New Years Resolution.
To answer these questions simply, you are making it too hard for yourself. Most people come up with too many or too lofty New Years resolutions, but then do to the hectic mess that is life, they either get discouraged or forget completely. We beat ourselves up to much when we don’t fully succeed in our resolutions, when there are several factors that most don’t even consider when thinking of new years resolutions. These resolution factors are not just for New Years resolutions, the very concept is just a goal veiled within the birth of the new year. Goals should be created as a blueprint that will give you direction to enable you to achieve them. This blueprint can be designed with the following parameters:
Set Realistic Resolutions
Often times when we set goals we do it without thinking about what is realistically achievable based on our current habits and the amount of work we are willing or able to put in. Simply stating “I want to lose 30 pounds” or “I want to get a 4.0 grade point average next semester” might be achievable for certain people. Albeit f you have no experience exercising nor do you want to dedicate every waking hour to studying when you’re accustomed to spending your free time watching Netflix, then these goals may not be realistic, and you are setting yourself up for failure.
Set an appropriate number of resolutions
You might be an ambitious person who wants to achieve a lot. This ambition is unhinged, unfocused. You have all of these things you want to accomplish, skills and habits that you want to improve on, but those don’t happen overnight. Think about something you are good at, or enjoy doing a great deal. How long did it take you to reach that level of skill? How many hours were you putting into it? Was there anything else you were working on at the same time? Even if it only took you a few months to achieve a goal or get good at something, did you have 10 other goals that you were trying to pursue simultaneously? Probably not, you most likely dedicated a large portion of time to that one thing. The same line of thinking should be applied to your resolutions. If you have too many, not only will you not be able to cross all of them off the list, but you may not even make it as far on the one you wanted to prioritize the most. Ambition can be powerful, but not when it is divided into a million pieces.
Make the resolution specific and fully defined.
Another problem a lot of people have when thinking of their resolutions, or setting goals in general, is not making it specific enough. Going back to the previous example: “I want to lose 30 pounds”. Well that’s great that you want to improve yourself in that manner,but how do you plan on doing that? How long will it actually take you. Do you want to lose 30 pounds because you think the weight you should be is 30 pounds lower, or do you simply want to live healthier and that’s the amount that you think will get you there.
There are a lot of factors to consider even with the simple statement that you want to lose X amount of weight. Do you want to change your diet? Do you need to exercise more and eat less? How do you plan on doing these things and sticking to them? Let’s hypothetically take this goal on collectively and then break it down a bit more. I’m going to propose a specific “goal formula” so that we can start to engineer this resolution into something that can become achievable:
I, [your name here], will [state goal here], by [insert date here]
Now let’s apply our weight loss example:
I, the Excelitarian, will lose 30 pounds by October 1st.
This has become our overarching resolution, our main goal that we want to achieve. We should keep this as the primary goal for the year, and make sure that we write it down. It’s okay to have other resolutions, but there should only be a few and we should be ready to recognize that we may not follow through with those 100%, because we are focused on losing thirty pounds by October 1st.
Then the “Oh, crap moment sits in”. We’ve made this contract with ourselves, but how do we go about accomplishing it? We need to break this resolution down into smaller, bite size goals. If we try to do everything at once, we may overload on the self-accountability and the willpower will crumble. How can we incrementally start to lose weight?
Decrease Food Intake
Change diet
Introduce and increase exercise
All three of these are habits that need to be developed. They will not happen overnight. This is where I need you stick with me here, because I’m going to throw out the concept of the new years resolution entirely. This is a tired idea embedded within our culture that allows people to put on a facade that they want to improve their lives at the beginning of every year. These may be harsh words, but think about your friends, your family, or even yourself that said they were going to do this great thing, only to be asked about it later in the year to have come up with some excuse or forget about it entirely.
Instead, I’m going to go against the grain and propose setting a new resolution every month. You may be thinking, “I thought he said I wasn’t suppose to set too many resolutions?” In this new format you aren’t, because the goal setting period goes from a year to a month, and you are only setting one resolution for yourself. The difference here is, now your lofty goal can be broken down into bite-sized tasks, or that long list of things you wanted to get done can now get spread out over the year. And to see the true test of your willpower, the deadline for yourself has just been divided twelve times. To keep with the colloquialism, let’s just call this new goal setting standard the New Month Resolution.
Let’s circle back to our weight loss goal:
I, the Excelitarian, will lose 30 pounds by October 1st.
This was our New Year’s resolution, and a whopper at that. But if we divide this up into monthly increments, this means we need to lose an average of 3.33 pounds per month. This is a realistic and well defined goal. We broke it down into modules: decrease food intake, change diet, and introduce exercise. Let’s pick “food intake ” for now and create a new month resolution for January out of it:
I, the Excelitarian, will only consume 2000 calories every day this month.
That’s not as daunting as losing thirty pounds right?Odds are if you are overweight and consuming a large amount of calories every day on average, simply restricting this will start to shift your metabolism to start burning excess fat*, allowing you to start shedding pounds.
This incrementalization can then be applied in the next month to start introducing healthier foods. Once those habits are developed, exercise can be introduced as another New Month Resolution. As the year progresses you continually develop a routine that perpetually drives you to your overall resolution for the year. The key here is to take things one step at a time. This is the main takeaway that can be applied to resolutions of all shapes and sizes, no pun intended…
Another important thing to remember when setting goals and working towards them is how to be accountable to yourself. No one else is going to be responsible for the goals that you set for yourself, so it is ultimately up to you to make sure you stay disciplined and smart about your New Month Resolution, or any of your goals. To solidify this, try this exercise. Make an official written agreement with yourself to set New Month Resolution at the beginning of every month for the next year. Make it something along the lines of:
I, [your name here] will set a new resolution at the beginning of every month for the next twelve months. Each resolution will contribute to my overall goals or primary goal that I set for myself at the beginning of the year. I will do everything in my power to accomplish my New Month Resolution each and every month.
Sincerely,
[your name here]
My New Month Resolution for the month of January is to submit one blog post every week. Check back in to make sure I’m sticking to my word. What is your New Month Resolution?
*Note, I am not a doctor or a nutritionist. This weight loss resolution is purely crafted for exemplary purposed. I do not claim to know what is or is not healthy for weight loss and am writing this from knowledge that is assumed. I am not responsible for anyone who reads this and utilizes this example.
Excelitarian 