New Year’s Resolutions Mid-Year Check In

How are you doing with your New Year’s Resolutions? Did you make resolutions this year? If you didn’t make any, what about any goals you set for this year or intentions you wrote out?

I know what you’re thinking: “It’s June. Why in the heck are we talking about New Year’s Resolutions?”

STATISTICS OF NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS

If you’re like the majority of people, you set resolutions or goals or intentions at the New Year, only to fail to follow through on them within weeks, and that’s if you even made any to begin with. How many times have we made the resolution to get in shape, only to ditch the gym after about a week? Or we commit to a new diet and then the first time someone puts a slice of cake in front of us, we cave?

In a survey of people from 2020:

• Only 27% of made any resolutions for 2020.
• Overall, the most popular resolutions for 2020 are to exercise more (50%), save money (49%), and eat healthier (43%). 
• Most participants (64%) kept some of the same resolutions from 2019 and also made some new ones.
• Of those that made a resolution in 2020, 35% kept all their resolutions, 49% kept some of their resolutions, and only 16% failed at keeping any of their resolutions. 

Source: https://discoverhappyhabits.com/new-years-resolution-statistics/

Where do you fall in?

It’s been six months since the start of the New Year – have you kept all of your resolutions, some of them, or none of them? Did you even make any?

The reason it is so important to check in now, is that it holds us accountable. It is so easy to set goals at the beginning of the year. “New year, new me,” as the saying goes. There’s something about January 1 that makes so many people feel like that is the time to begin a new workout routine or new diet or new optimistic outlook or whatever their resolution might be. But we often fail to keep our resolutions because we took no actionable steps to make progress towards achieving them or because they were unreasonable goals and simply not attainable.

Let’s step back and look at how to set an attainable goal.

SMART GOALS

In a 1981 article entitled, “There’s a S.M.A.R.T. way to write management goals and objectives,” George Doran, Arthur Miller and James Cunningham defined the concept of SMART goals. SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Reasonable, and Timely goals. Here’s what that looks like:

Specific: Set a goal with real numbers with real deadlines. Be clear with your goal making sure it is direct, detailed and meaningful. Be as specific as possible to describe your goal and the outcome you want to achieve.

Measurable: Set a goal that is trackable so you can see your progress. How do you know when you are on teach to achieve your goal? How do you know when it is complete?

Actionable: Set a goal that you can create real action steps towards achieving. Create a plan that you can stick with. Write your action steps down and/or put them on your calendar. The goal can be challenging, but it has to be achievable.

Reasonable: Set a goal that is realistic to avoid getting overwhelmed and unnecessarily stressed. Be honest with yourself and know yourself to know what you are capable of. It is okay to push yourself, but be reasonable about what you can achieve in the amount of time you are giving yourself to achieve it.

Timely: Set a deadline for your goal to help you stay focused and motivated. Again, be reasonable with your timeline.

Did the resolutions you set at the beginning of the year follow these criteria? 

IT’S NOT TOO LATE TO GET SMART

If you didn’t follow these guidelines for setting your New Year’s Resolutions, it’s not too late to go back and update your goals now.

In January, I set a resolution to “drink more water.” Can you see how that does not follow the SMART goals principle at all? I’ll be honest – I don’t like drinking water, so not only did I not really want to commit to drinking a set amount of water, I was actually afraid to fail if I set a goal for a specific amount. Basically I wrote down the resolution because I know drinking water is healthy, and I want to be a healthier person. I just didn’t want to actually drink the water.

You can probably guess what happened. I didn’t actually drink more water. Shocking! Sure I went through phases where I’d drink a little more than usual– but there were plenty of days when I hardly drank any water at all. Oops.

Not until April 17 when I finally committed to drinking one gallon of water a day for 75 days did my resolution actually transform into a SMART goal:

• I got specific by stating the amount of water I was committing to drink every day and the amount of days I was going to do it for.
• I was able to measure my progress daily by tracking if I finished my gallon of water for the day. I used a 64 oz (half gallon) water bottle to track the amount of water I drank. This also helped me track my progress. I set a goal to finish the first half gallon by noon, and then would refill my bottle and set a goal to finish off my gallon by 5 pm.
• I could easily take action towards achieving the goal every day by making sure I left the house every morning with my water bottle in tow, and then refilling it once to be able to get all of my water in.
• The goal is reasonable in that one gallon of water is a challenge, but not so challenging that it can’t be done.
• I set a deadline for completing the goal, committing to it for 75 days.

After doing getting SMART, I have now completed fifty-nine days straight of drinking a gallon of water and see no reason why I won’t complete the remaining days I have committed to. It was only when I got specific and set a measurable, actionable, reasonable, and timely goal, was I able to make any real progress. I wouldn’t have gotten this far with my goal had I not.

START TODAY

If you’ve managed to keep your New Year’s Resolutions this long, my hat is off to you! As I said above, most people fail to keep some or all of their resolutions. If you’re one of those people who let them go, that’s okay!

It may be the middle of the year, but there’s no reason that you can’t reevaluate your resolutions to implement the SMART system of goal setting and get back on track with them. You don’t have to wait until January 1 to be a better version of yourself. You don’t even have to wait until a Monday. Today is the perfect day to get to work on your old resolutions or even set new ones.

I would love to hear what your resolutions are! Please leave me a comment below and share your goals.

Until next time,

Jeri Austin

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