With intentions of breaking habits and setting yourself up for a prosperous year ahead, you might have found yourself inclined to set a New Year’s resolution among the millions each year who also participate in this annual tradition.
The fresh start of the new year unlocks countless opportunities to grow and self improve from the previous year. Resolutions set a driven purpose towards our goals in hopes of satisfying the desire to succeed. Because of peer influence, people have lost sight of the purpose of a resolution and get ahead of themselves. The idea of a picturesque year has led to the creation of ambitious resolutions and the issue with this is simple: setting far-fetched goals that require intense dedication leads to abandoning goals that we originally vowed to accomplish.
Realistically, people cannot commit throughout the entirety of a year to accomplish these resolutions. If the task is overly daunting, it can cause motivation to eventually dissipate. Then, come December 31st, we set another resolution and the pattern continues to repeat itself.
“There’s always next year,” has become way too normalized, and people are often complacent of the year before them because their resolutions are never fulfilled. According to a study conducted by Columbia News, only 25% of people each year that set resolutions stay committed after a month and fewer than 10% accomplish them. With these statistics in mind, why are we setting ourselves annually for discontent because of failed resolutions that aren’t accurate representations of measuring our growth?
While resolutions set our intentions for upcoming months, we do not have to be bound by a New Year’s tradition to work towards personal development. Oftentimes, resolutions we aren’t committed to can cause additional stresses rather than benefit us. Instead of a resolution, we should shift our focus on creating Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely (SMART) goals that support the progression towards more realistic goals that meet our needs.
Making a SMART goal monthly can allow us to pinpoint and measure our progress toward achieving a goal. It is more relevant to the current month and gives more clarity on what you are objectively working to accomplish. For example, someone trying to get conditioned for their sport might create a resolution such as “I will become more active in 2025.” An example of a SMART goal for the same resolution would be, “I will run one mile, three times each week and do weightlifting on days off of practice.”
SMART goals don’t offer the same broadness of a resolution and more importantly, are measurable from day to day. Both of these goals hold the same intentions of gaining endurance and strength, but only the SMART goal puts this plan realistically into action. Formulating our own SMART goal allows us to objectively keep a clear pathway towards our goals and can serve as a checkpoint to reflect on our progression. Even accomplishing smaller, more simple goals each month can positively reinforce the motivation to keep working towards what we resolve to do, which contributes to our well-being.
Excitement of the new year results in limitless aspirations of what we set out to accomplish. Although that is important, we shouldn’t confine ourselves to only finding the motivation to create goals at the beginning and the end of a year. Instead, we need to understand that opportunity lies in our hands to set a new goal monthly, or even daily that is more realistic to complete. Consider a tangible goal that fits your intentions best and remember to not let anything or anyone influence what your resolution is. After all, resolutions should be to strive for self improvement, not a competition of who’s the most ambitious.
