How to be Certain You Will Achieve Your New Year’s Resolution

This is how to motivate yourself to keep going until your New Year’s resolution becomes your reality. It is also how to not fail. 23-02

Photo by Sebadelval, Pixabay

It’s almost impossible to keep going with determination if you’re not in love with what you’re doing. Your destination has to matter, it has to be important or you won’t stick at it.

So it could be said that your definition of your resolution is the most important part of your motivation. However, we dealt with setting your resolution in the last article about How to Set a New Year’s Resolution That You Will Keep so let’s look at other alternatives that have helped thousands of people to their resolution goals.

Recognize that motivation is a feeling

Your motivation comes from your feelings. You feel energetic. You feel determined. You feel inspired. You feel motivated;

It is the strength of the feeling that is driving you that determines how fast and how hard you pursue your resolution.

How to use the power of your feelings

Your feelings start in your mind. Perhaps you have a vision of yourself achieving your objective. Perhaps your vision is a movie. (I can actually see myself, in my mind’s eye) achieving my objective. It is a continuous, ongoing movie that gives rise to strong feelings.)

The clarity of your vision, its bright colors, and the sounds that go with it all add emotional power to the picture. So, increase the strength of your feelings simply by clarifying, enlarging, and coloring your vision more brightly.

Try it now. Pause your reading for a moment. Bring the vision of you having achieved your New Year’s resolution to mind. Make the picture clearer. Brighten the colors. Make the picture larger. Play with the vision until you feel strongly about it. Then notice how much more strongly you feel about your resolution.

Using your feelings to maintain your motivation

As the year progresses more and more thoughts and feelings will invade your being. Some of these will work against your resolution. Others will simply distract you from your resolution. Your New Year’s resolution will be in danger of being buried in the mass of information and feelings. You will need to constantly bring your resolution to the top of your mind.

Perhaps there will be specific events that will force your resolution into focus. For instance, meal times bring food into focus for dieters. But if there is no natural event to remind you of your resolution you need to set up reminders.

Choosing specific times of day to focus on your resolution will work. I also use specific activities to bring my resolution to mind and create energy for my resolution. Perhaps there are people or events that will serve to bring your resolution into focus and allow you to regenerate your determination and energy.

How to stop yourself from giving yourself excuses

“It won’t matter if I give in, just this once.” How many times has some self-talk like this started you down the slippery slope of giving up?

Actually giving in once doesn’t really matter. It is almost certain to happen on your journey to achieving your resolution. BUT what does matter is when giving in once leads to giving in again…….and again…….and again, until giving in becomes a habit. That’s how you lose.

Psychologist Ethan Kross at Michigan university has come up with a way to counter the voice in your head. In his book Chatter, professor Kross describes a process he calls “distancing”.

Distancing is about making the voice in your head less personal. In other words, when you speak to yourself it is personal, but when someone else speaks to you their message is coming from a distance, it is less personal and you are more likely to take notice of what the other person says.

Professor Kross recommends that you become the other person in your head by the simple means of using the third person when you speak to yourself. For example, rather than saying to yourself, “It won’t matter if I eat that chocolate bar just this once.” You could say, “David (your name), you really should not eat that chocolate bar when you are resolved to lose weight.”

The second example of self-talk above sounds like advice from a well-meaning friend. Hopefully, it would be enough to make you pause, think and change your action.

Measure your progress

Motivation scientists talk about the “goal gradient effect” which tells us that it’s really important to measure our progress so that we get an idea of how well we’re doing. So your milestones matter in that they give you an idea of how near or far you are from your ultimate goal. But the real benefit is that you can see that you’re moving in the right direction. It is the sense of movement that constantly revitalizes our motivation.

Every time you notice you’ve made progress you become more eager to make more progress. The nearer you get to your objective the harder you work to finish the job.

So set your milestones now. Write them down or put them in a spreadsheet as I did in the last article How to Set a New Year’s Resolution That You Will Keep and Which Will Add Value to Your Life

Practice makes resolutions become your new reality

I find it helps me enormously to have a story about how I am moving toward my resolution. My story includes what I am doing to make my resolution my reality and the feelings I have about my resolution. I am the hero of my resolution story.

The thing is that my story moves with me wherever I go and whatever I’m doing. So my current activities become part of my resolution story. For instance last year my resolution was to become a writer as well as a coach. My major milestone was to. write and publish 200 articles.

In my story, I sat down to write at 09.00 every day. When I was walking around I would constantly ask myself, “Am I seeing or hearing anything interesting that I can write about?” As I approached a group of people I would alert myself, “Keep your ears open for anything interesting you might want to write about. Also, watch out for any interesting gestures or expressions that people use.”

My story was the vehicle that carried me from practice to practice until I achieved my resolution.

Write the story of your resolution. See yourself constantly acting out your story. Chat to yourself in the third person every time you find yourself weakening. Revitalize your efforts constantly as you reach each milestone on your journey.