As Christmas passes, inevitably we come to the end of 2016. Yet another 365 days, another revolution around the sun, another year comes to a close.
It is at this time we are most reflective. We think about the people we love, the people who came into our lives in the year past, and the people we want to keep in our lives for years to come. We think about ourselves and the struggles and challenges we have overcome and how we have developed over the course of our lives.
And after all of this thinking is done, we are left with looking to the future. What do we want to achieve in the coming year? How would we like to change? This inescapably leads us to – New Year resolutions.
The infamous New Year Resolutions…the ones we make every year, never to fulfil. I think one of the reasons why our resolutions are never achieved is because we make open ended statements. “I want to lose some weight”, “I want to spend more time at home” – none of these are measurable, so you don’t exactly have an achievable goal. How much is “some” weight, how much is “more” time? Try to make more specific statements so that you can identify exactly when you have attained your goal.
Another reason resolutions never work is because once the reflective haze, that the new years has placed us under passes, it becomes easy to lose sight of the importance of things. At the end of the year, it’s simple to see why things such as health and family matter; the fact that a year has just ended gives us perspective. It acts as a reality check. We seem to suddenly remember that our days are numbered. But as the New Year begins, this perspective is quickly lost, and it feels as though our lives will continue on infinitely. We think that we have an unlimited number of days to achieve our goals and everything can be put off for the tomorrow that never comes. So what can we do? Perhaps one thing we can try is reminding ourselves daily of our goals. If we never let them out of our minds then it’ll be difficult to not achieve them. If it means you have to put up inspirational messages on your walls or write in a daily planner, or even sharing your resolution with a friend and ask them to help you commit to it, if this goal is something you truly want to accomplish, all the effort will be worth it.
Finally, sometimes we never keep up our resolutions because we simply don’t intend to. We make resolutions purely to say that we’ve made one. If this is the case, just stop. If you don’t want to achieve a goal, then it’s not a goal. And no amount of strategy is going to get that done.
In closing, I wish that everyone has a prosperous New Year. May it bring to you the challenges that you need to help you grow into a better version of yourself. And finally, may you accomplish all that you resolve to.
