3 Tips for Sticking to Healthy New Year’s Resolutions

New year, new decade, new resolutions! You are starting over. You have bought new journals, the new exercise clothes are clean and waiting to be pulled from the closet on January 2. The new diet cookbooks are lined up and you are the “new you,” ready to take on the world. But wait, there is a snag.

Let’s be honest: it’s the same you as it was yesterday. Just because it’s a new year, and in this case a new decade, doesn’t mean you suddenly transformed into a whole new person. That would be awesome if that happened but it doesn’t.

Sure, we set goals and resolutions and have hopes and dreams for things we hope to accomplish in the coming days and weeks. But we didn’t change overnight.

Every year, we sit down at the end of the year and think about all the things we would like to change. The weight we’d like to lose, how we’d like to be nicer, or maybe how we’d like to be more introspective. We get really excited for the new year.

The first week of the new year comes and we are rocking it. We are exercising and are cooking all the healthy meals! Our houses have never been more clean and organized and our journals are filled every day. But slowly, we start exercising less. The clutter starts finding its way back into our houses, and those journals that were once at the forefront somehow seem to be less important.

It never fails that many of us do not succeed at our resolutions, and then we get frustrated at ourselves. Why do we continue to do this to ourselves year after year? It is simple, really; we didn’t plan or prepare for those resolutions properly. Would you just say you were going on a tour of all the national parks with no road map, no plan for the best way? Or would you haphazardly bounce around the country visiting national parks in alphabetical order, maybe just drawing names out of a hat? No; you plan. So, here are some tips for setting resolutions and succeeding in the new year.

1. Set small, realistic goals.

If you want to lost weight, for instance, set a goal of losing a smaller amount first. Setting a larger goal is too daunting and you likely won’t stick to that goal, so start with a smaller one first.

2. Make every goal specific.

If you want to grow your business, setting the goal to simply “grow my business” doesn’t give you anything to work toward. But if you set the goal of gaining three new clients every month, then this gives you something to work toward.

3. Make the goal mean something personal.

Going back to exercise, if you are exercising because you want to feel better in your clothes and feel better about yourself, you are more likely to stick to your goal. Why? Because it’s personal.

Setting and sticking to goals is hard no matter when you start, but it seems like it’s even harder when you start at the new year. Hopefully, these tips will help you stick to your New Year’s resolutions.