A new year is upon us and you know what that means: resolutions! 2024 presents an opportunity for growth, a chance to start fresh and build healthy habits, and devote yourself to learning practices that will improve your overall wellness. Making resolutions and starting them is easy; the hard part is keeping them. How many of us have charged into a new year, big-eyed and bushy-tailed, and bought exercise equipment that ends up gathering dust in a closet a month later? How many gym memberships get picked up and go unused by spring? Or commitments to cooking more at home leading to nothing but a pile of unread cookbooks gathering dust on a shelf? It’s hard to make progress without willpower. The good news is that you can develop willpower and strengthen your ability to follow through.
Be Public About Your Intentions
Whatever your goals are, a great way to stay motivated is to announce your plans ahead of time. Planning to lose weight? Tell your loved ones. Post about it on social media. If you’re working to complete a goal by a certain timeframe, make that deadline public. The pressure to not fail can be a powerful motivator. Once you’ve announced your intentions, there will be people in your life who will ask you about it without your prompting. Those little check-ins could be just the kick in the pants you need to stay on task.
Get an Accountability Partner
Do you have a friend you can check-in with on a regular basis? Someone that you trust to keep you honest and accountable about your progress? Getting an accountability partner gives you someone to report to. It can be easy to fool yourself into thinking you’re making progress when you’re not. With another person in the mix, it’s much harder to lie to yourself if you’re not putting in the work. An accountability buddy can also be useful in offering an outside perspective, so if you find yourself getting stuck on a problem related to your goal, they can help you find a way forward.
If you have a friend with a similar goal, the two of you can both motivate each other to stay on top of things. A workout buddy or a friend who’s taking the same classes as you will know first-hand what you’re going through.
Keep a Record
Do you keep a journal? If you don’t, it’s a very good habit to pick up for improving willpower. Like the accountability partner, the journal represents a reality check. If you’ve got nothing to report, the proof is in the pages. Recording your progress from week to week can be quite encouraging as you can see the results over time. If you’re trying to lose weight, tracking your weight every week provides you a number to watch. Trying to save more money? Jot down your account balance each week.
You can get pretty granular with journals. Working out a lot? Notate your workout routine (don’t forget to include the number of reps!). Marking down the concrete steps you’re taking to achieve your goal can be empowering: you can see the effort you’re putting into this. Writing everything down can also expose weak points or problem areas that you haven’t addressed yet.
Small Steps Before Big Leaps
Setting too big a task for yourself can be self-defeating. That’s why it’s important to set achievable goals. Be realistic about your abilities and the time you have available to devote yourself to these efforts. Once you’ve set realistic goals, try to break those goals down into smaller subsets. Let’s say you want to lose 50 pounds this year- think of how many pounds you’d want to lose in a month. That becomes your immediate goal. If you’re looking to write a novel, set a weekly word count. Hitting small goals consistently builds momentum and instills confidence in yourself.
Gamify Your Growth
We all like receiving rewards for a job well-done, so aim to give yourself a few. Develop a system of rewards. The rewards could be tied to the completion of small goals or to length of time (“if I do this every day for a month, I’ll treat myself to ____”). This kind of gamification is an effective way to stay motivated. It helps to give yourself small rewards as you go and save the big rewards like going on vacation for the completion of your overall project.
Be Kind to Yourself When You Falter
You’ll probably stumble at some point. Maybe you skip a few days at the gym. Maybe you fail a class. Perhaps that pie you’ve been trying to learn how to bake just won’t come out right. Take these setbacks in stride. The temptation to abandon a resolution because you fell short can be strong. Treat failure as a learning opportunity. What did you do wrong? What could be improved upon for next time? Should you take a different approach? Don’t beat yourself up over these things. In the words of the late Aaliyah: dust yourself off and try again.
Article by Austin Brietta
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