Resolutions could be a great way to make a positive change in your life
….So please, don’t quit on them….
Another year is coming to an end. Besides getting ready for Christmas, and according to what I saw outside, it’s a real madness, we are also getting prepared to self-improve ourselves.
I know, I know. We still have other ten eight or nine days left to manage everything in the old year because who doesn’t want to start fresh in the new one, right?
It’s pretty much the same thing every single year. Looking back at our lives and actions, we see it all — the good, the bad, success, failure, the happy as well as sad moments, things we haven’t even touched or started to work on. The list is endless.
We always set out to do so many things and in the end, we hardly ever keep up to our resolutions. This isn’t me making an assumption based on my own experience. I stopped making New Year’s resolutions approximately two or three years ago. Later, I’ll explain you why.
Damn! According to many different types of research, approximately 80–85% new year’s resolutions fail by mid-February. That means that barely 15–20% of people stick to what they set out to accomplish. It will probably be even less, because sometime around mid-January, there is the Quitters’ day, when as a study shows, people are most likely to give up their New Year’s resolutions.
We’ve been doing this for 4,000 years
After a little bit of digging on the internet, I found out that making new year’s resolutions is a tradition as old as 4,000 years.
Not to bore you with long historical essays, you can read about this by googling ‘the origin of making a resolution’.
….but now, let’s get straight to the main point.
Resolutions could be a great way to make a positive change in your life.
An excellent way to set yourself on a journey to eventually live a life you want to lead. But, before you make a set of new resolutions, maybe you should think about it a little bit more.
Everyone always does a little bit of retrospective. Have you achieved everything you aimed for in the past 365 days? Do you still have a long way to go? Those are the classic questions we ask ourselves.
Rethinking your old resolutions
If you haven’t accomplished all your resolutions and goals yet, do you need to take new ones? What if instead of making new decisions, you’d try to revisit the old ones?
What if you’d try to rethink them?
Do you want to continue with whatever you haven’t accomplished yet?
If yes, what is it that you need to change to achieve your goal?
Are the resolutions you took still essential to your life?
How did your life and values change over the year? Does it make sense to still work on those resolutions?
I’m just putting it out there. It’s always good to take a step back and reevaluate what has happened. I’m mean, I don’t think you want to end up being chased by your unfulfilled resolutions, do you?
You don’t have to wait till the New Year
I couldn’t think of a better sub-title. I wrote earlier that there is this 4,000 years tradition because of which people somehow ended up taking ‘New Year’s resolution’.
But now and then, I remind myself that there is always an exception to the rule. And honestly, I don’t see a reason why it couldn’t be in this case as well.
Tell me, what is the purpose of waiting to start something in a new year when you can do it now?
Unless you are a master of procrastination. Then, I get it. I used to be one. ‘I’ll start fresh in the new year,’ used to be my favourite sentence. Until I stopped taking resolutions and just started working on things I want to improve or achieve right away. Because why to waste any minute, since day after day, we are running out of the time we have left.
Imagine how much time you could save and how much earlier you could accomplish what you want to, without procrastination.
What does the future hold?
Some of the most common resolutions people make are connected to health, love, finance, career or family. Here are some examples I came across:
- To live a healthier life.
- To find a girlfriend.
- To have a small beer belly. (yes, I found this onefor real).
- To save more for our future home and family.
- To find true love.
- To sign up to a gym.
- To be a good friend or be there for my friends and family.
- To find a new job, or I want to move to a new country.
- A wish that people are more compassionate, understanding and loving.
And many many more. In 2012, Google created this amazing google map of resolutions that allowed you to see the wishes of millions of people around the world in real time. Pretty cool. However, despite all the amazing resolutions people had, there was one thing always missing.
What does it mean to live a healthier life? What does it mean to be a good friend? What do you say by the true love you want to find? What is the new job you want to get? What country do you want to move to and why?
Make resolutions that are SMART.
Sometimes our wishes and resolutions are too generic, and therefore a little bit difficult to accomplish. How do you plan to achieve to be a good friend? How do you plan to save more for your future home and family? Try to make your resolutions as concrete as possible.
By having a clearer idea of what you want to achieve, you’ll create an actionable decision with the commitment that will be harder to forget or fail by what, as research suggests, is mid-February (or any other month you basically let go of your resolutions).
Instead of making a resolution of being a better friend, make a resolution of calling or talking to your friend at least once a week to ask how they’re doing and see if they need someone to laugh with, a shoulder to cry or they only want to talk. To save for your future home and family, set a goal to set aside a certain sum at the beginning of every month for the next one or two years. Doesn’t this make things a little bit easier?
Connect them to something that will motivate you to complete them. Don’t make resolutions, just for the sake of having some.
Even if you take only one resolution and make it happen, it counts more than twenty vague and unfulfilled promises to yourself.
Make resolutions you want to really want to work on, down deep in your heart. And if you feel like you want to give up or can’t accomplish resolutions yourself, just ask a friend for help. Don’t you think this could be an excellent way to kick the Quitters’ day in the ass while not quitting on yourself?
Here is to many fulfilled resolutions and dreams to come true in the coming year(s). Go get them tigers!
