Making New Years Resolutions the SMART Way
So here we are, halfway through the first month of the new year. Decorations are put away, we’re back at work, and life is going back to normal after the craziness of the holiday season and the period of quiet anticipation between December 25th and January 1st. Some folks made New Years resolutions. And some folks are hitting that point where they’re struggling to keep up with the resolutions they made.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with struggling to keep up with New Years resolutions. The struggle is so common that it’s become a bit of a meme. With an experience seemingly this universal, surely that must mean that resolutions are impossible to stick to. So why bother?
Well, this comes down to how most people form their New Years resolutions. See if this sounds familiar. It’s almost the end of the year, a time for reflection and imagining what the new year will bring. You take stock of where you are in various aspects of your life and think “I need to make a change in these areas. That will increase my quality of life.” Maybe you decide that you would like to be healthier, a very common New Years resolution for many people. So you hit the ground running on January 1st. But as the month wears on, maybe things start popping up in your daily life that get in the way of your new routine. Maybe you decide you don’t want to do it on a certain day. And eventually, you wind up right where you started. This resolution to be healthier is completely doable, like many New Years resolutions that find the same fate mid-January. It just all hinges on how you set it up.
Resolutions are just like any other goal that you set during the rest of the year. Therefore, resolutions follow the same rules as goals. This means that, like other goals, resolutions should be specific, measurable, actionable, reasonable, and time-based (or SMART). Let’s break these down to take a closer look at what they mean.
Specific - What exactly are you trying to achieve? In our example, the goal of “be healthier” is not very specific. What does “healthier” look like to you? What aspects of the large topic of overall health are you looking at? If we wanted to make this goal more specific, we could say “I want to exercise more often.”
Measurable - How will you track this goal? Our example goal of “I want to exercise more often” is a good start, but what does “more often” mean? Is it five days a week? Three days? One day? How much time per day do you want to exercise? To make our goal measurable, we could adjust it to “I want to exercise for an hour a day, five days a week.”
Actionable - What steps can you take to make this happen? We know that we want to exercise an hour a day, five days a week. Maybe we can decide how we want to get that exercise. Yoga? Going to a physical gym? Just taking a walk around the neighborhood? What actions will you take to get that exercise? In order to make our example goal actionable, we could say “I want to take an hour walk in my neighborhood five days a week.”
Reasonable - Okay so maybe five days a week is a little much. It would be nice to be able to find an hour every single day to take that walk, but maybe that’s not reasonable for you and your schedule. Making your goal reasonable takes unnecessary stress and frustration off your plate when you’re trying to achieve your goal. This isn’t a sign of failure in any way, shape, or form. Rather, being aware of what is reasonable for you is key to creating goals that will actually work for you in the long run instead of running out of gas partway through. Let’s say we change our goal to “I want to take an hour walk in my neighborhood three days a week.”
Time-based - Finally, we have the last piece of the puzzle. This is where many New Years resolutions fall flat on their faces. When we make New Years resolutions, we almost never set a time frame. It’s almost just assumed that this resolution will go on forever and ever, through this year and into the next. But when you get there and you’re staring down the road that your goal will take you down, it can be completely overwhelming and create the urge to just give up. This is why it is imperative for your goals to be time-based. It is much less stressful to work towards a goal that has a set end date. If your goal is to complete a project, you can budget your time and not feel like you have to do everything at once. If your goal is more about changing a behavior, like our example, a time-based goal gives you an end date where you can regroup and make changes if needed. Making our example time-based could look like “I want to take an hour walk in my neighborhood three days a week for a month.”
Adjusting your New Years resolutions into SMART goals is a great way to make those resolutions more attainable. But don’t forget the key pieces to achieving any goal: support and accountability. My final tip for making great New Years resolutions and sticking to them is to hire a coach. Coaches are an excellent source of both support and accountability, as they provide their clients with the space to celebrate their wins and to make adjustments to their goals as needed. With a coach involved in the process, sticking to your New Years resolutions ends up feeling like a team effort rather than a solo mission.
It can be a struggle to keep up with New Years resolutions. There are lots of distractions and old habits that can get in the way of your progress. But by making your resolutions SMART and having the right support systems in place, you can increase your chances of success significantly.