New Year’s Resolutions – How to make them count?

New year is here. It seems like a small and irrelevant transition, just one day, a new date, but it triggers many emotions. We tend to think of what we have achieved last year and we start making plans and dreaming about things that will happen in the next twelve months.

A staggering number of people will make resolutions but only few will successfully achieve their goals. Some may say it is because of their weak motivation, others will blame the crazy pace of life.  How to approach resolutions to make them possible, tangible, and achievable? Let’s analyse them together and make plans that will help you grow this year.

Reason, repetition, reassurance

Before you drop everything and rush to change your life, I’d like you to ask yourself one question: “Why do I want to do it?”. Try to give it a thought and get deep into the matter. Let’s say you want to lose weight. What is the reason? To weigh less sounds obvious but a deeper understanding of the matter would be: to get healthier, to stop having backpain issues or to feel better in my body. These reasons make it more personal. Write it down on a piece of paper and put it in a place where you often look. This will be your beacon – it will show you the way. If you ever get frustrated or lose interest in what you are doing, just look at it and imagine yourself at the end of this road and how it makes you feel.

Small steps for great results

There are two possible paths for approaching your goals. You can just drop everything and immerse yourself totally in the experience or you may take it slow and get closer to the finish with some baby steps. The first option sounds thrilling. “The second one is for the weak ones”, one may say. But let’s take a different view, shall we?

If you are a person who has never run longer than ten seconds to catch a bus, the possibility of running for one hour a day sounds incredibly improbable. I’m pretty sure you will call everything off after a couple of days. Starting slow is not a sign of weakness but a strategy if you want to stay consistent. Why don’t you begin your jogging routine with 5 minutes and add 5 more every week? Completing baby steps gives you more sense of achievement and awakens appetite for more. If you start with unrealistic steps, you won’t last long.

Preparations for success

Your goals may be tiny or pretty huge but they all need some preparation. If you want to start running in the morning, prepare your jogging shoes before going to bed the night before. Doing it in the morning plus trying to decide what to wear, sounds like an awful lot of time and a waste of energy. If you want to learn a language, first do a research and enrol to a course or buy all the necessary books. 

Preparation is everything. If you make it into a mindful part of your journey, you will enjoy the process even more. Clean jogging clothes smelling of your favourite perfume or new notebooks for your language classes which you enjoy looking at are a nice incentive to start the activity. Make it count!

Don’t break the chain

Rome wasn’t built in a day. Achieving a goal doesn’t happen overnight and you are aware of that. The key to success is consistency. That’s it! Mystery solved.

Do you remember the piece of paper where you wrote the reason you wanted to achieve your goal? Attach a small piece of paper showing the current month. Schedule when you want to spend your time working on your new year’s resolutions and draw a small circle in these dates. Every time you finish your task, colour the circle in. This way you create a chain of circles that will eventually lead you to the finish. Your job is not to break the chain. Whatever happens, however lazy you feel or you have something better to do, never break it.

Be your best friend

You have made your plans but so many things may change in the next twelve months. Let’s be honest, you are only responsible for your own actions but everything else around you is beyond your control. It is not a reason to panic but rather to hear and accept. 

You were supposed to run for one hour every single day but you got flu and stayed in bed for some time. You start getting frustrated as time flies. Your running shoes are looking at you silently and make you feel even more guilty. I will stop you right there. Don’t get into this spiral of self-hate. Treat yourself as your best friend. You heard it! Imagine that your best friend was in the same situation and decided to confess to you. What would you tell them? Probably to take it easy, get better, and start over again. We are easy to give advice to others rather than help ourselves. So if in a doubt, ask yourself: “What would my best friend tell me to do?” and just be kind to yourself.

Before you go to change your life, let me tell you one more thing. New year’s resolutions are only a good idea if they are honest. Making them out of habit or just to follow others not to be left out is not a good enoughreason. Decide to change your life because you want to, not because someone tells you to. Your genuine eagerness to do so will guide you and give you strength.

Happy New Year form all our Team! 

Sending the warmest wishes for the New Year, to all your drams and wishes come true, take care of yourself <3 

Written by Anna Sokołowska