How to Achieve your Goals and New Year Resolutions

The beginning of a new year can be a time of fresh starts, new goals, and starting over. Starting new habits, diets, and routines can offset a healthier more fulfilling experience throughout the year, especially if those positive changes are made when the year starts. What’s most difficult, however, when it comes to setting goals for a better lifestyle, is maintaining and sustaining those healthier practices following the initial thought of merely wanting to be better.

How do we move from wanting to be better through the goals that we make, to actually achieving those goals and maintaining them?

Setting Feasible Goals

The first step to creating and visualizing the lifestyle you want for yourself is setting feasible goals that will continuously motivate you to be better. The more accessible the goal, the more likely you will strive to achieve that goal. What’s tricky about setting goals that will show lasting results is understanding that those goals and ambitions can change. It’s okay to adjust and create more relevant goals that will still get you to the destination you want.

When setting feasible goals, ask yourself questions like:

What is my goal?
What do I want to accomplish?
Why do I want to achieve this goal?
Is this goal aimed at a need or a desire?
On a scale of 1- 10 how much do I want to achieve this goal?
Do I want to put in the work to maintain this goal?
How likely am I to keep up with the demands of this goal?
Can this goal be broken up into smaller tasks to make it easier to accomplish?
What are my expectations of this goal?
Will this goal take time to achieve?
How much patience do I have to sustain this goal?

Planning For Success

Once you establish the feasibility of your goals, you can begin the process of achieving them. Begin to schedule and plan around the demands of the goals. Schedules, routines, reminders and check-ins can help with goals with higher demands. With desire and motivation to get where you see yourself going, the planning step will come easier and more natural.

The most challenging part of planning for success in the process of reaching your goals is accountability. Once you see yourself slipping and falling behind, acknowledge your slip up and jump back into your process, remind yourself why you set those goals in the first place. Slip ups are a great opportunity to reevaluate and set more relevant goals to make sure you’re satisfying what you actually want to accomplish.

Success and Achievement

Achieving a goal you worked hard for is indescribable. Knowing that you put in that much work, effort, and sustainability will influence a new level of power and self-respect each time you set a more challenging goal. The more goals you accomplish, the easier it will become to motivate yourself to continue to do better and be better.

Reminder: Remember to be gentle with yourself and the expectations of your goals. Some goals can only be achieved during different seasons of your lifetime and that’s okay. It’s okay to not be able to achieve all you want to achieve when you want to achieve it. It’s also okay to make small goals as well. Take your time with your goals and give yourself time to achieve them. Not everyone’s life will turn out the same and no one has it all together, so no need to compare another person’s accomplishments to yours. Everyone is different and there is no timeline to success.

Now, let’s start achieving those fulfilling goals!

Nina is a Latina from Brooklyn, NY who struggles with depression and anxiety. She finds refuge and healing through her writing since she graduated from college in 2016. Nina writes to spread awareness and hope to those who struggle with their mental health silently. She also strives to motivate and encourage self-acceptance. She enjoys creating creative and uplifting content on her blog SparklyWarTanks.com where she shares her experiences, notes, poems, quotes, and articles