New year's resolutions are cliché. “New year new me” is a stupid phrase commonly used by people with more focus on how they look in the accompanying picture on Instagram than on how to make anything other than meaningless short-term things improve. But maybe I’m being too hard. I just feel that people do more hoping to be a perfect, beautiful, successful, nice person instead of accepting who they are. Once you accept who you are and embrace your imperfections, you are more willing to shoot for realistic, and therefore achievable, goals.
Resolutions flood the internet and conversations around this time of year. And don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate resolutions, I just hate false pretenses. I actually enjoyed looking back on the previous year and determining where I can improve realistically in the following year and/or semester.
And I know I’m not an expert or wise by any means. But I thought I’d take some time to assess common techniques that work so I can look back on this list later.
1. Make a plan
What do you actually want to accomplish?
Once your goals are simple and reasonable, make them measurable and structured. You can’t accomplish any goal without a plan.
I think the largest problem with how many people, including me, approach resolutions is that we think they are grand promises of perfect. It is more helpful to think of them as goals. And it is important to not be too hard on yourself by selecting too many or too unrealistic resolutions. That’s my real problem with “new year, new me”. While change is necessary, it’s just inaccurate to think you can change more than two things about yourself at a time. Don’t get me wrong, you can still reflect and change more areas of your life later but just focus on a few things at a time.
2. Motivate
The most important thing about achieving your goals is remembering what it feels like to not achieve what you want. Evaluate your mistakes because remembering past struggles can make the new task seem easier. I recommend remembering failures to begin aspiring to your new goal, then remember past success to find the motivation to continue.
3. Retry and Reevaluate
Some part of your plan will fall through, whether you’ve had a bad week, month or day. So take a second to re-motivate, and try not to be too hard on yourself. Find another starting point and keep trying. No one says you have you can’t restart your progress toward a goal. If you find you were too unrealistically optimistic setting your goals, adjust it. But if you merely find it daunting at the moment, change your short-term goal and build to the larger goal.
4. Reward
You’ve achieved other goals, don’t let this year be any different.