How to Make a New Year Resolution You Can Actually Keep
One of the best parts of the New Year is setting an ambitious New Year resolution. But not all New Year’s resolutions are the same. Most people set New Year’s resolutions that are difficult or impossible to keep, ending in disappointment. A good New Year’s resolution is one that is achievable and will make you feel great as you go.
The most common New Year resolutions are to lose weight and exercise more. While those are great aspirations, they’re bad New Year’s resolutions because they don’t set a clear path to success.
You can do better for yourself by creating your own New Year resolution that fits your aspirations, your abilities, and by applying some basics of human psychology. These are our steps to creating the best New Year resolution for you:
Analyze your motivations.
Focus on inputs, not outcomes.
Set quantifiable goals.
Don’t be hard on yourself.
Forget the New Year.
Bonus: Use Pantheon to help you set your goals and find motivation.
1. Analyze your motivations
Before you get to the fun part of setting a resolution, you should reflect on what exactly you want and why. It is easy to chase a goal without wondering if that goal will get you what we really want, and if you have a clear understanding of what you want, you can set a better resolution that accurately reflects that.
If you don’t know where to start, imagine yourself completing your goal to identify what you will feel like when you succeed. What about that scene is exciting for you?
For example, your goal may be to improve your running speed to prepare for your first marathon. Ask yourself: what is important about completing the marathon with a better speed? When you cross the finish-line for the first time, will you be most excited about how well you placed? Or is there something else that you want at the finish line? Maybe you will be most proud to cross the finish-line healthy and uninjured so you can celebrate with your friends. Maybe you will you be happy about the shape you’re in and how good you look in pictures to cherish later.
There are no right or wrong motivations. But being thoughtful and honest about why you want what you want will help you set the correct resolution. Maybe what you want isn’t to get faster, what you want is to run a fun, injury-free race; in this case, your resolution can focus on improving your running form. Maybe you want to look good on your race; your resolution can focus on managing your physique, finding the right outfit, and showing up to your marathon looking healthy and fresh.
Examples:
Bad resolution: Get faster for my first marathon.
Good resolution: Train for improved running form once per week so I can finish my first marathon injury-free.
2. Focus on inputs, not outcomes
This is the most important part of setting a resolution: your resolution should be to complete specific actions, not to get specific results. There are two important life truths to keep in mind. You cannot get the outcomes you want without completing the correct inputs, and you have full control only over what you put into your life. The outcomes are not always in your control.
“Work alone is your privilege, never the fruits thereof. Never let the fruits of action be your motive, and never cease to work.” — Bhagavad Gita
There are a few reasons why setting a resolution based on inputs works better than one based on outputs:
Inputs are the best way to direct your actions. Outcomes are hazy and hard to act on. For example, a resolution to “get stronger” can look like anything. It can mean going to the gym more, lifting heavier weight, or drinking more milk. Choosing a specific input to get stronger helps guide your actions. It’s better to choose an input like “go to the gym more.” It’s a specific action over which you have direct control.
It’s easier to succeed when you focus on inputs, especially when the outcome you want will take a long time to achieve. If you’re focused on the outcome, it’s easy to become discouraged when you don’t see results. It may take months to get noticeably stronger, but if you choose an input like “go to the gym more”, then it doesn’t matter how long it takes to get stronger, you'll still feel good about yourself because you're taking action every day towards your resolution.
Focusing on inputs is protection for when things don’t go according to plan. Life is full of surprises, but no matter what it throws your way, you can always take specific actions for yourself. If you’re trying to get stronger, you may get injured and see your strength slide back. But even if you’re injured, you can still go to the gym and focus on injury recovery or work uninjured parts of your body.
Examples:
Bad resolution: Get stronger.
Good resolution: Go to the gym for heavy strength-training twice per week so that I can feel better stronger when I play with my children.
3. Set Quantifiable Goals
Once you have an idea of the input you want to set as your resolution, you should set quantifiable goals for your resolution. This requires 2 elements: 1) how much of the action are you going to do and 2) how frequently. For example, if your resolution is to run more, you should decide how much more running you want to do over a specific interval. Your resolution can be to complete 10 runs every month, or to run 3 miles every week. Setting a goal in this way makes it easy to plan, track, and evaluate.
It can be fun to set big annual goals, like running 365 miles in a year. In these cases, it’s helpful to break the goal down into smaller deadlines. Instead of tracking 365 miles over an entire year, you can aim for 30 miles per month or 7 miles per week. Having these deadlines makes it harder to procrastinate. It’s easy to think you can skip a month of running and catch up in the following 11 months, but the longer procrastinate, the harder it is to catch up.
The numbers you choose should be conservative. Don’t set large goals for yourself if you’re starting something new and don’t know how well you can perform. If you’ve never run, a good starting point may be to run 2 miles per week instead of 2 miles per day. It’s good to be ambitious, but you’re being ambitious in setting a resolution in the first place. Don’t make it too hard on yourself.
You should also try to bake in some amount of flexibility. Running 1 mile every day sounds like a great goal, but there may be days where you can’t because of travel, illness, or other life circumstances. You can instead choose to run 7 miles every week so you have the flexibility to take rest days and make up the distance by running a couple of miles every few days.
Examples:
Bad resolution: Run more.
Good resolution: Run 30 miles per month for a total of 365 miles in the year so I can feel a sense of achievement for running one mile per day for a whole year.
4. Don’t be hard on yourself
Sticking to a New Year resolution is hard. A year is a long time. If you happen to fail at keeping to your resolution for a period of time, that doesn’t mean you have to give up entirely.
If you lapse on your resolution, forgive yourself first, then modify your resolution for the rest of the year. Make the most of your time. If your goal is to practice yoga twice a week and you don’t make it to yoga for 2 months, its better to work on making it the other 10 months than giving up altogether. You’ll end the year with 10 months of yoga instead of none.
5. Forget the new year
The new year is a great time to set new goals for yourself, but that’s because it’s always a great time to improve your fitness, wellness, or develop new skills. Instead of waiting for the new year to set an annual resolution, pick up new goals for yourself throughout the year. They can be for a full year, or they can be for a few weeks.
If you happen to fail on your New Year resolution, you don’t have to worry about not completing it within that specific year. You can pick yourself up and try again whether its New Year’s Day, April Fool’s Day. New Year’s Eve, or any day in between.
6. Bonus: Use Pantheon to help you set your goals and find motivation
Pantheon is an app that motivates people to improve their fitness and wellness. We use a lot of the techniques discussed here to set personalized goals and objectives that will help you feel empowered as you go through every day of the new year.
If you don’t know where to start on your fitness journey, Pantheon will give you personalized step goal and challenges to help you get going.
You can share your accomplishments with your friends or invite them to Pantheon to motivate them along with you. Pantheon is free in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
