15 Strategies to Make Your New Year Resolution Successful?

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Have you made your New Year Resolution?

I hope it’s not a strange to ask the question here as many of us make new year resolutions every year like reducing weight, having regular exercise, reducing consumption of sweets & sugar, quit smoking, starting a new habit, starting new business, learning new skills and many more. But the strange thing is that, almost 90% of us forgets the resolutions by the end of the February. Eventually, we can say we quit even before we start making the changes.

Now the question is that, why we fail to achieve the newly made resolutions. If you have ever asked the reason why you have failed to make the changes, the first answer will come is “I have tried, but it doesn’t work fine and hence failed”. Actually, the fact is that you have not tried with commitment and good intention. And the reason behind it is, you have lacked the skills to make and adopt the changes. Here are few strategies to define your problems and improve it to make it successful.

The most important things to make your new year resolution fulfilled are the Mindset, Goals & Will Power. If you have just made the resolution, because others are doing it, then it’s not going to work at all. You should have a strong mindset to make the changes along with few other strategies mentioned below.

1. Change the Environment: Environment triggers the behavior. If you want to quit smoking, first identify the factors those trigger your habit like the time and place which triggers the habit or those people with whom you like to smoke. If there are certain time when you consume alcohol or smoke, try to plan for some other activities in that particular time. If certain places trigger your smoking habit, then avoid going to those places and the surrounding people.
2. Avoid exquisites, Genes can’t decide your future: If you are a diabetic and making your mind to start exercise in the new year and a thought is dragging you behind that “It’s a genetic thing, as my parents and grand parents are diabetic and for that reason, I must be a diabetic. So no use of exercise”. In such cases, you should remember that genes can’t decide your future if you are committed towards your goal. You have to build consistency to achieve your goal.
3. Analyse what you are doing and what you can do for your plan: Before making a resolution, have a SWOT analysis of self. Analyze honestly, what you are doing related to your new resolution and what you can do further to make a change.
4. Find your challenges: Identify the factors those are restricting you or the probable factors that may restrict you moving towards your goal. List those challenging factors and find appropriate solution against each challenges.
5. Lessons learnt from your failure: If you have tried the same thing earlier and failed due to any reason, enlist those reasons in your challenge list and find the ways to overcome.
6. Change your default options or default behavior: If you have a habit of consuming junk foods in breakfast and you are making a resolution to reduce your weight, then it’s not going to work at all. If you are aiming to learn a new skill this year and you are spending the evening with friends in gossiping and watching TV, then also the case is same as before. Here consuming junk foods, gossiping or watching TV or movies are your default habits. You have to leave some default habits, if you want to culture new habits.
7. Learn how your habits affect your behavior: Your habits are fuel for your behavior. You can say habits are the input and the behavior are the output.
8. Start from small changes/steps: If something seems big and challenging, break it down into small chunks. If you want to eat an elephant, then it might seems impossible, but if you cut into small pieces and eat those in a consistent manner, then within few days or weeks, you will finish the tasks and after finishing it will be quite easier than ever. If you are aiming to write a book in first quarter of the year, but it seems impossible to you, then the first step is start writing and then as the second step, just write a page or 500–1000 words daily in a consistent manner. You will see within a month or two, your first draft will be ready.
9. Grow into your Goals- Fix a target and have a measuring system. Analyze intermittently how much you have proceeded. With each steps of progress, it will motivate you to move extra-mile.
10. Announce publicly: Make an announcement publicly through your social media handles or group meetings. It will put some pressure on you to move forward.
11. Compete with those having higher skillset: Competition is good, but it should be a healthy competition. You should compete with yourself and with those having higher skills than you. If you compete yourself, then the competition should be Me Vs Myself or Today Vs Tomorrow. And in case of competing with others, you need to compete with the persons having higher skills. it will motivate you to move forward. along with you can learn new skills during the journey. Never compete with those having lesser skillsets than you. It may ruin you.
12. Rotate your environments: Working in different environments will boost your productivity. If you like to work in your study room in a daily basis, try to have it in the lawn. It will refresh your mind and your productivity may be boosted.
13. Have break in between: You can change your environments to take a nap from your stressful work life in between like having a vacation with family or friends. You can also take small naps in between your work like Pomodoro technique. There are so many application you can find in the AppStore for Pomodoro, in which there is an alarm for a nap of 5 minutes in every 30 minutes.
14. Be with family: The ultimate support you can get in need is from the family. If you fail to achieve or lag in your target, then family can be a setback for your comeback.
15. Be patient and flexible: If you lag in your mission, then don’t be panic or impatient. It’s a normal thing to stay behind your target. If certain strategy fails, then adopt new strategies and implement with patience. Only secret is don’t be ideal and keep moving whatever the speed is and your Success is Guaranteed.

Let me know in the comment section, how many habits among these 15 are being cultured by you and which one you are going to adopt this year. For a personalized communication, you can be connected with me on Instagram & Twitter or join us here for regular updates.