Every New Year has a certain quality. A brand-new year begins for us on January 1st, and it always feels a little like “beginning over.” Almost everyone has made New Year’s resolutions with the intention of improving upon what they did the year before. This time, we made commitments to stop nail-biting or smoking, get in better shape, renovate our bathroom, spend more time with our loved ones, etc.

It’s funny how much our current plans resemble those from previous years. This is due to the fact that on New Year’s Eve, we discover that we did not succeed in achieving all of the objectives we had set for ourselves at the start of the year. On New Year’s Day, we usually make these plans for ourselves with the best of intentions, but we frequently fall short of carrying them out successfully throughout the year. It’s time to demonstrate what specifically goes wrong the majority of the time now that the year has been going for a few months. A few issues will be defined first. The following section will offer ideas and advice to help you achieve your goals and keep your New Year’s resolutions.

Five reasons why we fail to follow through on our plans :

The fact that there are so many New Year’s resolutions is the first issue. If you only make one resolve, such as quitting spending money on excessively costly shoes, your friends may not take you seriously. Most often, people make a number of resolutions rather than just one. A lengthy list of goals can be perplexing. Some of your plans can be interconnected and interfere with one another when carried out. For instance, quitting smoking and dieting at the same time will be challenging. Candy is typically consumed after quitting smoking to squelch cravings for a smoke. You put yourself in a position that is twice as difficult if you concurrently abstain from eating candies.

The need that your aim is self-concordant is a second issue. You must pursue the objective for internal, personal motives and not for external, externally imposed reasons. If you don’t want to succeed academically, it will be more difficult to do so if your parents want it for you. People frequently are unaware that they are pursuing objectives that have been imposed upon them by others.

Underestimating or simply ignoring the difficulty is a third issue. We frequently underestimate the amount of work it will take to accomplish our objectives. Because we are so habituated to executing the behavior, breaking a negative habit requires a lot of work. You probably know you shouldn’t do something when it comes to poor habits. Our awareness of the behavior’s prevalence is diminished because we almost always engage in it. When we attempt to cease a certain activity, we only learn how frequently we engage in it.

Fourthly, we typically create New Year’s resolutions in an extremely abstract manner. For instance, if one of our New Year’s resolutions is to lose weight, we typically don’t state when or how we’ll do it. Our plans are abstract, which makes it more difficult to carry them out and also makes it simpler to cheat. There is no reason to stop ourselves from eating that additional cookie if we do not state that we will begin losing weight today. When we create abstract plans, we often wind up scheduling all the time-consuming tasks for “tomorrow.”

The fact that we punish ourselves too harshly if we fail is a last issue with carrying out plans. Thinking you can’t do it at all is a common reaction to not carrying out a specific plan detail. However, this does not assist you in achieving your objective. If you stray from your diet for one cookie, it usually won’t hurt you too much if you continue to follow it the rest of the week. If you eat a cookie and tell yourself that you’re a complete loser who will never be able to lose weight in your life, chances are that something will go wrong. You’ll probably feel so horrible about it that you won’t even try to stick to your diet, and as a result, you’ll probably devour the entire box of cookies. Your diet will suffer from that!

Winning Tactics

How can we overcome these issues and enable ourselves to genuinely accomplish the resolutions we made on New Year’s Eve?

• Aim to accomplish one task at a time initially.
• Choose one resolution from your list and begin trying to put it into action.
• Your objective must be specific and unmistakable; it cannot simply be, “I want to exercise occasionally.”
• Your aim should also have the appropriate degree of difficulty. It should need work to achieve, but not be insurmountable.

You will succeed in your resolutions this year!