Happy New Year everyone!
I hope you all had a great start into 2025, a new year of possibilities and potential. So, what else could I write about today than New Year’s resolutions.
The time to cut off toxic relationships, negativity and everything holding you back whilst looking forward to building something new and improving.
At their core, these resolutions are nothing other than a way of goal setting; and that is a skill itself. The way you phrase and set your goals, the plan, the roadmap you create to reach it, all of these have a huge impact on your journey and possibility for success. So, let’s talk about that:
First of all, you obviously need to determine a goal. Popular resolutions revolve around the themes of health, career, finance, social connections, and self-improvement.
When thinking of something you want to achieve it is important to keep two things in mind:
Don’t overreach. Deciding on too many different goals can lead to overwhelming. Sometimes it’s more rational to focus on a few goals and work on them thoroughly than trying to achieve 100 things at once.
Specify. Now being more specific with your goal will be especially helpful in the beginning. A goal which is too broad can result in not knowing where to start. For example, setting a goal such as ‘health’ includes many different areas of life. Do you want healthy hair? Healthy relationships? To others or yourself? Do you want to eat more healthy? Do more sports? Trying to improve in all of these areas at once will get us back to the previous aspect.
Now you need a plan. This part might actually be the easiest nowadays. You can gather information or find helpful videos online. Another popular method nowadays is to just ask AI.
I saw that there’s a new trend in which you write down your desired life and ask ChatGPT to prepare a roadmap on how to get to your goals.
So, there are plenty of shortcuts to creating a roadmap nowadays.
The next, and probably most difficult task is to actually follow the plan, through rewarding and tough times, to not give up. Here is where many fail.
So, here are some ideas on how to stay motivated when pursuing your dreams:
1. Games
Don’t we all love rewards. The way our motivation rises once there is a price to win. Gamify your goal by creating a little reward system for achieving each step in your plan.
Whether you want to reward yourself instantly with a sweet, or a specific product you wanted to buy, or create a point system which allows for a variety of treats is up to you. I’ve once seen someone using a point system as some kind of currency to spend on rewards of different sizes.
Gamify your journey and have fun while working hard.
2. Themes and Challenges
If you’re like me and get bored easily than this might be the right thing for you.
When doing the same thing over and over again I get tense and bored. That’s why I like to mix in a little challenge or a follow different themes to keep myself motivated.
You could create weekly or monthly themes, such as a skill month, a work month, a self-love month, etc, and even combine these with related challenges, eg learning an new instrument in your skill month.
Another way to use themes is as an overall guideline. We said before that setting a goal to broad can give you a hard time in accomplishing it. But you could still make decisions with it in mind.
Looking at our example ‘health’ again: you could focus on a healthy body for example, but use health as an overall guideline. For example, you still chose not to overwork, or not to go into that toxic relationship, or not to stay up until 4 am when needing to get up at 8.
3. Two > One
Get a friend, family member, or acquaintance involved. If you two, three, or more, keep checking up on one another, motivate the other one’s, and move forward together, you won’t only happen to improve your relationship, but have a great source of motivation as well.
If we work on our own, the option of giving up appears way more attractive than when working with others.
Making sure someone else keeps up is easy, we don’t always consciously relate to the hard work accomplishing a goal involves. That’s why it’s helpful to work with as a team, as they won’t let you off the hook; you both want one another to actually reach the goal.
4. Letter
Write a letter to your future self. What are your goals, what do you plan on achieving, how do you feel about yourself and your life. Tell your future you and open the letter next New Year’s Eve.
Trust me, this only takes a few minutes but is a very wholesome experience when reviewing your letter next year.
It will help you to remember the year and evaluate whether what you’ve set your mind to was achievable, you put in enough effort, where to improve and so on.
You might even want to create a little folder in which you keep the letters. If you enjoy this idea, try writing one letter for the whole year, and four other ones for each quarter of the year.
5. Accomplishment collecting
Grab a jar, a pen, and some paper – that’s all it needs. Whenever you feel like you’ve reached something, whether it’s a big milestone or a small achievement, when you’ve had a pleasant experience, met someone new, or whatever made you happy, write it down and add that note to the jar.
Next New Year’s Eve, you can open your collecting and remember the positive parts and aspects of your year.
I like to write down the date and sometimes the place or time with my note before adding it to the jar. This way I can maybe revisit photos or other relating things when opening my notes.
If you want to, you can create different jars. One for accomplishments (in your resolutions, work, self-improvement, or everything together), one for happy moments, friends, or things that made you smile, another one for things you’ve learned that year, and so on. This way you could also use your jar to collect knowledge and learn or remember what you’re grateful for and what brings you happiness.
6. Motivational/Vision boards
Lastly, motivational or vision boards are great to keep you motivated. They include pictures and phrases and visualise your goal.
Keeping them close or at a place in your daily routine will remind you of your goal everyday and therefore reinforce motivation.
We have a separate post about creating motivational boards which is linked at the end.
As many New Year’s resolutions evolve around some area connected to self-improvement, there are many we have already spoke about here on WithinProgress. So, here are some posts related to popular New Year’s resolutions or goal setting:
>> Developing Will Power <<
>> Creating Motivational Boards <<
>> Setting Boundaries <<
>> Keeping Balance (Diet, Sleep, Movement and Money) <<
>> Failing <<
>> Forming Habits <<
>> Cleaning and Organising <<
>> Journaling <<
>> Confidence <<
Listen to yourself! Set your mind to something you want to pursue and don’t give up.