How to stick to your New Year’s resolutions and other goals

With the start of the New Year comes the annual ritual for many people of making New Year’s resolutions. Unfortunately, research indicates that most such resolutions are abandoned after a short time. The good news is that there are some proven effective strategies to help you stick to your New Year’s resolutions. The bonus is that you can use these strategies to help you to stick to the pursuit of goals which you set at any time of the year. I will discuss these strategies in the following sections.

Make an action plan

One of the most effective tools for sticking to goals at any time of the year is an action plan. Simple but effective, it entails breaking your goal down into specific actions and assigning specific days and times to perform those actions.

The tool’s effectiveness relies on the premise that you are significantly more likely to perform an action when it is scheduled for a particular day and time. You can wean yourself off action plans once the actions become habits. Until that point, using them can make the difference between continued pursuit of your goals and abandoning them.

Develop short-term goals on your way to long term goals

Pursuing long-term goals can add passion to your life. However, your ability to stay the course in pursuing long-term goals is often enhanced by breaking such goals into shorter-term goals. One reason is that achieving short-term goals on the way to long-term goals makes it more likely you will ultimately attain your long-term goals.

An additional benefit of short-term goals is that they provide you with tangible rewards in the short term. This can boost your mood and your self-confidence on your journey to provide you with the fuel you need to keep doing the work necessary to get to the finish line. For example, if your long-term goal were to complete a marathon, short-term goals to pursue on in the process may include completing a 10-kilometer run followed by completing a half-marathon.

Focus on process goals

Having success in staying with goals is aided by distinguishing between two types of goals. These are outcome goals and process goals. Outcome goals are what we usually think of in discussing goals. They entail attaining particular results such as completing a university degree, making the team in a sport and building a deck.

Process goals are those actions you perform regularly which give you the best chance of achieving your outcome goals. Based on the examples I just gave, process goals would be studying regularly, attending lectures and working on assignments for university courses; attending team practices and doing workouts to stay fit; and working regularly on tasks such as hammering and sawing that will move you toward your goal of completing a deck.

Although identifying attractive outcome goals is important to provide you with the passion and motivation necessary to put in the necessary effort toward their attainment, while you are doing the work itself it is usually best to focus on process goals. The reason is that your ability to attain process goals is largely within your control. That is, all you need to do is put in the effort to perform these actions. As such, the stress you feel when focusing on process goals is typically at a much more manageable level compared with what happens when you focus on outcome goals.

By their nature, outcome goals are challenging and their attainment is in many respects less within your control. Therefore, while focusing on outcome goals when you are not working toward the goals can be great for generating excitement, passion and energy, focusing on them while doing the work can lead to experiencing stress and other emotions like frustration at hard to manage levels.

Make it easier to delay gratification

One of the biggest challenges in continuing to work toward goals is that they necessarily involve delay of gratification. That is, instead of engaging in non-goal directed activities which can bring you immediate pleasure, you often must forego these and the accompanying pleasure they bring in favour of engaging in activities in pursuit of goals whose attainment will bring you pleasure at some point down the road.

Foregoing immediate enjoyment to put in work toward a future goal on a regular basis can leave you feeling as if you are continually depriving yourself. In turn, this feeling may result in the belief that this regimen is unsustainable and so you give up on the pursuit of your goals.

Providing yourself with enjoyment and pleasure in the immediate and short term while you do the hard work necessary to work toward your long term goals will leave you feeling energized rather than deprived. This, in turn, will make it easier for you to sustain the effort to work toward your long-term goals.

There are various ways you can give yourself this pleasure and enjoyment in the moment while working hard toward your long term goals. One way is to schedule times to engage in non-goal activities which provide you with immediate pleasure and enjoyment. As long as you allocate time to work toward your goals, there is no reason for you not to also schedule time for pleasurable activities whether they be socializing, watching movies or listening to music.

Secondly, breaking up your long term goals into shorter term goals will provide you with the pleasure of having accomplished feats on the way toward the accomplishment of your long term goals.

Thirdly, if your pursuit of goals involve you engaging in activities which bring you a sense of meaning, confidence, purpose and value, the immediate positive effect this can have on your mood and motivation can provide you with an ongoing boost of energy to keep doing the work toward your long-term goals. So choose goals which require activities which you find intrinsically enjoyable. That is, you enjoy the activities in and of themselves regardless of whether doing them leads you toward the accomplishment of long-term goals.

Choose goals with activities which you enjoy intrinsically

When you are performing intrinsically enjoyable activities which give you a sense of meaning, confidence, purpose and value, the activities may at times appear to run themselves despite requiring concentration and effort. Sustaining these activities in pursuit of long-term goals is then much easier because you would likely perform these activities even if you were not performing them in pursuit of long-term goals.

May you stick to your New Year’s resolutions and other goals,

Dr. Pat