The new year is upon us, and it’s time to make a plan for keeping all those resolutions! Whether your plan was to eat better, read more, quit a bad habit or pursue a professional goal, a surefire method of sticking with your resolution is to make sure you change it a little bit every single day.
“It ultimately comes down to consistency” life coach Lisa Wilgram says. “For example, if you resolve on January 1st to cut down on sugar, on January 2nd, clarify to your friends and family that this is only about sugar before 5 PM–that way you can have some of the candy you bought on the way home from the New Years party before your resolution really kicked in. And on January 3rd, let everybody know that chocolate doesn’t count.”
“By the end of the year, there won’t be a resolution you can’t keep!”
While sticking to goals can be tough, Wilgram says it’s important to get creative with new and improved versions of your resolution. For example, if your original goal was to read the news every day, and by June you’re reading it once a week, it might feel like there’s nowhere to go.
“But that’s when you have to consider what the whole idea of what “reading” really means. If you just fall asleep with one browser window on your phone open to the Globe and Mail and your phone stuck against your face, you’re getting the same info, right?
In fact, Wilgram says, sometimes the easiest way to achieve them can be out-of-the-box thinking.
“A lot of people get hung up on semantics, like ‘I’m going to do 50 situps a day’ versus ‘I’m going to lie on the floor and think about doing situps every day’. There’s no need to get bogged down in that. In fact, it’s important that by the end of the year, your resolution basically sounds like it’s gone through 365 turns of a game of Telephone among people who really don’t want to cut back on their drinking or work on their hobbies.”
Finally, Wilgram says, another fantastic way to avoid ever breaking your new years resolutions is to clarify that they weren’t for this new year, but for next new year.
“Nobody ever got promised you’d read Jane Eyre in 2020,” Wilgram says. “And just think, clarifying that your New Year’s resolution starts a year from now will give you lots of time to think about ways it can be improved on.”
