Finding ways to stick to our goals
Either during the course of our New Year celebrations, or soon after, many of us derive New Year’s resolutions as a means of tackling a personal problem in our lives. In the course of weeks or months, however, scarcely do people ever gloat or pride themselves on the success of fulfilling their resolution.
This year, on New Year’s Eve, I enjoyed many lists and New Year’s compilations of “The Best of 2014” before 2015 hit. One of my biggest enjoyments was the YouTube channel “List25,” which outlined the top most unfulfilled New Year’s resolutions. Many of these are well noted: getting more exercise, saving money, losing weight, learning, and traveling, as well as quitting nasty vices like smoking and Facebook.
New Year’s resolutions trace far back into history and religion as promises made in wake of the New Year; yet, the success rate for each term of New Year’s resolutions is still abundantly low when looking at people today. For students, it seems that fulfilling resolutions can be even harder with so many back-to-school socializations and influence from peers. As soon as you intend on staying home, going out less, and not indulging in partying atmospheres, you have several friends telling you about a bar night. As soon as you want to do better in school, there is a non-stop course of friends wanting to go out because of the break and time spent away.
When examining New Year’s resolutions, social outings are not simply what impedes their success, but also the timing and fashion of resolutions coming so abrasively into people’s typical lives. As soon as you want to exercise, you’ve been a couch potato for eight-months, have horrid cold January weather to prevent you from going to the gym, and can’t manage an hour’s time to work-out. A pattern can be equally hard as a habit is to break. What’s worse is that, in order to fulfill one New Year’s resolution, it seems we have to do several other New Year’s resolutions. In order to read more, it is likely you’ll have to break the Facebook and YouTube habits, as well as your procrastinating behaviour – maybe you’ll even have to cut your social outings out as well. This makes resolutions much less enticing and much harder for people to see the silver lining in fulfilling these promises made on New Year’s.
To assess a better likelihood of fulfilling resolutions, I feel that there are better steps that can be made to improve your chance of completing that resolution. One is to alter the view of how realistic your goal is. If you want to get in shape, that could be a foreseeable possibility in the course of a year. If, however you just saw the movie 300 and have YouTube’d a Navy Seal workout to prep like an A-list actor to get ripped, then you might need to re-examine your goal. Next is to plan. Have you ever heard the expression “A goal without a plan is a wish?” You may have started to realize this, or have just learned the hard way. Planning seems to be an effective way to walk through the process of completing those tedious projects and, in this case, resolutions. You may find that it’s a better perspective to look at things by not being intimidated by extensive projects or difficult tasks at hand. Finally, find like-minded people. This may be the most difficult thing to do. Your friends are great and fun to be around, but, sometimes, even your friends don’t have your best interests in mind. If you need to study and get those grades up, or really have an ambition to pursue an interest, not having support can definitely kill those ambitions. Finding an environment or a social crowd, like a club or team, can be a strong backbone to keep your resolution in check, and it’s also a good way to meet new people.
So good luck for everyone in 2015!