Opinion

Setting New Year’s Resolutions

Enter the New Year with Achievable Goals


Invincible.

That is how most of us feel when deciding what will be our New Year’s resolution. Our goals, hopes, and dreams that we fathom of achieving seem like a hop, skip, and a jump away from becoming reality. 

Go to the gym every day. Eat organic. Become a vegetarian. Quit smoking. No more sweets and desserts. Stop drinking alcoholic beverages. Spend less money on non-necessities. 

Goal-setting is such a wonderful incentive for change, and aiming for tangible and achievable goals is much more practical.

Although the above list is a small portion of the most common New Year resolutions, most of them are not met.  How come?

New Year’s resolutions seem to be spontaneous motives that we make immediately after the holidays.  It is almost a self-evaluation of ourselves during the past year, and we seek ways to improve who we are and want to be. 

Long-term goals are one hundred percent attainable. However, they must be accompanied with short-term goals that allow us to take the small steps that are necessary to get to where we want. 

When we desire for these goals to be met immediately, we lose sight of those minor yet significant steps.

Without a realistic and practical approach to how your resolution will be achieved, it will be broken.

How can we make our resolution real without breaking it?  The first and most important concept that must be understood is that attitude is everything. 

If your New Year’s resolution is to workout at the gym every day, yet you view exercise as a burden, your goal of losing weight or improving your physical health will not be achieved. 

If your resolution is to instantly cut out all desserts yet you find yourself miserable at the thought of no late-night sweets, this resolution will not be met. 

If any of your resolutions are going to make you less happy, they are not worth making. 

As mentioned before, the most important part of making a resolution are the short-term goals. 

Say you want to become a vegetarian. Rather than immediately cutting out all meats from your diet, select a few days a week the first month to eliminate animal products.  The next month you can add on another day and so forth. 

Say you want to reduce your alcohol intake. Rather than dumping every beer and liquor down the drain and refusing to look at anything that reminds you of drinking, give yourself a monthly or weekly schedule that allows you to visually outline which days to enjoy a few drinks. 

Some of you may be thinking, “Why make a New Year’s resolution?” It seems like a complicated and meaningless venture to come up with a goal that can be so easily broken, especially if the motivation to continue it throughout the year is lacking.

Not everyone decides to make a New Year’s resolution. Some see January 1 as a day of simply starting over instead of starting fresh. 

However, I think a lot of people decide to make a resolution to make the New Year feel as if it begins with a clean slate. 

It provides an opportunity to excel at something, to do something good for yourself or others, and to become a better person.

New Year’s resolutions may seem difficult to keep, but they are meant to challenge a person. Welcoming new things into our lives is the best way to learn more about ourselves. 

Making a resolution will allow us to see if our attitude, personality, and character have what it takes to keep the promise we made to ourselves.

The holiday season is a time of self-evaluation, and the New Year is the time to make those changes that we want to see.  So this holiday season, set tangible goals and work toward reaching them.

It doesn’t have to be an immediate achievement, but proving to yourself that you can accomplish it is the best gift you can give yourself.