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Make This Year Amazing: How to Achieve the Most Common New Year’s Resolutions
It’s the New Year and you know what that means – it’s time to make your New Year’s resolutions. New Year’s resolutions are an opportunity to bring about positive change to your life. While most of us go into our New Year with the best of expectations, according to a study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology, less than half of us are successful at achieving our resolution (and even less people achieve any kind of goal without making a resolution).
What can you do to stay on track and achieve your resolution? We discovered the 5 most common resolutions and compiled the best strategies for making each of them happen. Are you ready to make this year amazing?!
But First, Avoid New Year’s Resolution Failure with These Global Tips for Positive Change
- Be realistic – Don’t overwhelm yourself by creating dozens of overly ambitious goals. You’ll quickly find that although your intentions are the very best, overly ambitious and abundance of goals leads to fast burnout. Instead, focus on a single, manageable goal that will bring about a sustainable lifestyle change.
- Track your progress – Being in the digital age, we are blessed to have a variety of tracking tools at our fingertips. What you use to track your New Year’s resolution will vary depending on your specific goal. Whether you use your phone or a journal, keeping track will prove to be the secret ingredient to your success.
- Keep your resolution top of mind – While researching New Year’s resolutions, one common reason why they fail is that people forget about them! This is why it’s so important to keep your resolution top of mind by tracking it from day one. Forget to track a day, week, month? Don’t worry about it, just keep pushing forward.
- Get into the right mindset – Prepare yourself mentally for successfully achieving your resolution. Remember, the most successful resolutions are ones that bring about a full lifestyle change. That is why it is so important for you to look at this year’s resolution as a sustainable, full-life pivot. One of the best ways to get yourself into the right mindset for achieving your New Year’s resolution is by strengthening your skills on making habits stick. Try reading books like Atomic Habits, The Power of Habit, or the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. We guarantee you will be changed by the incredible advice found in these pages.
#1 Most Common New Year's Resolution: Improve Heath
According to Discover Happy Habits, over half of Americans in 2020 stated their New Year’s resolution was to be healthier, whether it be via improving fitness, eating healthier, or losing weight. As the king of resolutions, you’ve probably had this as your very own resolution at one point or another. With so many of us embracing better healthy, what causes us to fail?
Your health is absolutely unique to you, so something that worked for someone you know may not work for you. Finding your best path to health is a very intimate process and requires resilience, patience, and commitment.
While there is no “one-size fits all” strategy to follow, there are some universal truths that offer a great place for you to start. Unfortunately, these are the “rules” that most of us know and really are tired of hearing: improve your eating habits and infuse exercise into your routine. As much as we’d love it, you won’t be able to improve your health and fitness by watching Golden Girls with champagne and cheesecake – our bodies don’t work that way.
Instead, try to focus on things you can do and finding the little joys in your healthy habits. Not a fan of veggies? Try smoothies and sneaking some inside. Hate running? Go for a daily walk with your family. Hate drinking more water? Start a water competition with your friends and family (this is something our A-Team has loved doing).
Not enough time to do any of these? Shift your paradigm and make health a priority. This is the one body you’ve got, and you deserve to treat it right.
Some tools to consider to improve your health include journaling and using apps like My Fitness Pal. Keeping track is going to be essential, as it’s hard to measure success without benchmarks. Remember, start with a manageable goal. Instead of eating salads every day, do something that is sustainable, like adding a salad or meatless Monday to your meal rotation. The more manageable you make your New Year’s resolution, the better chance you have at success.
#2 Most Common New Year's Resolution: Better Finances
The second most common New Year’s resolution we found online is to find ways to improve finances or save money. Similar to improving your health, there’s no single recipe you can follow for improving your finances, but there are some universal truths. Depending on your current financial state, there are several fast and easy steps you can take right now to improve your finances. If you’re starting from scratch, these tips are a great place to start.
If you’re looking for more advanced financial improvements, we recommend taking steps to hire an expert. Find someone you can trust to help maximize the income coming from your savings. If you are intimidated by the idea of hiring a financial representative, consider looking into robot investing. With less fees than your standard financial representative, robot investment companies like Betterment offer an easy way to get started making investments.
Above all, one easy step we can all take today is improving the way we monitor our expenses. There are several apps out there to assist you with this, including Inuit’s Mint app. Bring all your banks into one place and monitor your spending trends. You can even set goals and budgets right in the app!
Like improving health, it’s important to set SMART goals when setting your New Year’s resolution about finances. What do we mean by SMART? We mean goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based. When your make your resolution SMART, you significantly impact the likelihood of achieving them. For example, the resolution of “improve my finances” is not smart, but the resolution “Grow my net worth by 20% as of December 2022 by monitoring and minimizing expenses” is very SMART.
#3 Most Common New Year's Resolution: Get Organized
The third most common New Year’s resolution is to get organized. When you organize your home or office, you make it a more pleasant environment in which to occupy. Moreover, studies have shown that decluttered spaces lead to better focus and decluttered minds. In fact, the benefits of being organized go well beyond the immediate physical niceties and translate into a healthier life!
The best way to successfully start your organization resolution is to create a plan. Work through your clutter step by step, starting with the most obvious: Christmas decorations. The holidays bring about a lot of extra clutter and chaos. Kick off your goal for being more organized by safely packing and securely storing your ornaments and decorations.
Make your life easier next year by putting away decorations neatly and efficiently (we recommend using a glassware kit for those extra delicate pieces). For items that do not need to be accessed frequently, extend your home into one of our . Our climate controlled spaces are designed to protect and preserve your belongings. When Christmas 2022 rolls around, you can swing by your space and exchange Christmas items for your everyday décor.
If your home is overrun with clutter, try tackling your organization goals room by room. Be realistic in what you can achieve – each room should take several days. Start sorting items by “Keep”, “Toss”, “Donate”, or “Storage”. Consider the intrinsic and monetary value of each item. If you need help with this, a great resource is a professional home organizer.
#4 Most Common New Year's Resolution: Eliminate a Bad Habit
We all have our vices and when it comes to the new year, it’s common place for us to resolve to eliminate our worst habits. Whether you want to cut down or completely eliminate a bad habit like drinking alcohol, smoking, biting your nails, or even Netflix binging, you need to plan ahead. These sorts of habits are the toughest to give up, but often are the most rewarding. A key is to keep track and to be resilient. There are a multitude of apps on the market that will aid you in keeping track of giving up your vice. Our favorite free app is Daily Habits. Simply check the box each day you were able to successfully go without your bad habit.
Of course, certain habits are trickier than others to kick. Be sure to get professional help whenever necessary. Your health is a priority, and your efforts will be greatly rewarded!
#5 Most Common New Year's Resolution: Be More Productive
Couldn’t we all infuse a little extra productivity into our routine? Think of the things you will accomplish! Productivity is often found in the most unexpected places: planning ahead and taking more breaks. That’s right! Each and every day, train yourself to strategically plan your day and incorporate breaks. Set small, achievable goals and note when you have overreached (and adjust the next day).
While it may seem counterintuitive to spend time planning verses doing more work, consider this: without a plan, you don’t have a place to focus your energy. Moreover, without breaks, the work you output becomes less valuable and the more time you waste (not to mention burnout or fatigue).
We’d love to know what you aim to accomplish this year! Is it one of the most common ones we identified or are you doing something different? Leave us a comment and let us know!
