How to accomplish all of your New Year's Resolutions

“Respect your efforts, respect yourself.  Self-respect leads to self-discipline.  When you have both firmly under your belt, that’s real power.”- Clint Eastwood

A new year is approaching!! Happy New Year in advance!  Many of us have New Years Resolutions to look forward to in the new year.  Whether they are big or small goals, it is always important to set goals in life.  It gives you a sense of inner accomplishment when you can say you achieved something on your own terms, for your own good.  But, like many things, there’s kind of a cheat sheet to achieving your New Year's resolutions.  Consider these tips when making your New Years resolutions and this year you might just accomplish all of your goals!

One general rule of goal setting is setting achievable goals.  Now, this doesn’t mean selling yourself short.  But, if your goal is to be the President, realistically that’s not achievable in 2018.  You can work toward this goal, but achieving it in 2018 wouldn’t be realistic.  Setting a goal of getting a campaign manager would be more realistic, that way planning for the next election year can be done effectively.

Write it down! It’s so easy to forget what your goals are when you don’t write them down.  Before writing them down, they’re just ideas.  An idea alone is great, but an idea on paper is powerful.  One thing that helps me is writing them in a Google Doc.  It is so easy to lose small things, or single sheets of paper.  I already know I would lose a piece of paper, so in order to plan for that I save it in a Google Doc.  Therefore, I always have access to it, I can’t lose it even if I wanted to.  And I can edit it easily. It’s okay to edit your goals from time to time, circumstances change.

A lot of New Year's resolutions can have no foundation.  By foundation, I mean a schedule or a plan.  If your goal is to workout more but you don’t workout at all now, how can you be sure you even know where to start?  Get a gym membership now, or prepare by setting up meetings with a trainer for January.  Set up a schedule in your phone calendar or start looking for that gym buddy now.  By putting this effort in now, you’ll be able to start the process of achieving your goal without wasting all of January due to lack of direction.

And one of the biggest reasons people don’t accomplish their New Year's resolutions is a late start.  If you’re like most people, you don’t think about making a New Years resolution until someone asks you what yours are.  Or maybe you think of them right before the midnight countdown on New Years Eve.  But, by the time you think about it again you may already be well into January trying to recreate the list you thought of on the spot.  This is no way to start a successful New Years resolutions list.  Start now!  I created my New Years Resolutions list a few weeks ago, and looked back once or twice to revise it.  I plan to accomplish each of my goals.  It’s scary taking big steps at times.  But if you prepare and take it seriously, accomplishing it becomes inevitable because you put the work in early.

So get that job, tone that body, get that 4.0, buy that house! I have complete faith in you.  Follow these steps and take it seriously.  A New Year's resolution is a great way to breath new life into yourself.  It gives you a new perspective, something to look forward to.  You’re going to accomplish them, believe in yourself, and lets get to work!

“If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or objects.”- Albert Einstein

Amaka