A New Year’s resolution can seem like a guiding light as we start a brand new year, but it eventually becomes a chain holding us back. I have found a better way to set goals for the year and I am sharing it with you!
I leaned on two resources from this site (these articles are helping me more than I thought, hope they’re helping you too!):
1. Setting and Achieving Goals: A Cheat Sheet
The issue with New Year’s Resolutions is that they can pigeon-hole us a bit too much. It forces us to make close-ended goals with fixed timelines. It reduces our goals to ticking items of a to-do list, this means we’re losing their opportunity for holistic growth. When we set more open-ended or dynamic goals, we make room for growth. For example: with a new year’s resolution you might say you want to lose weight by April, but taking a more open-ended approach would look like you setting a goal to improve your health.
Setting a goal to improve your health vs setting a goal to lose weight by April allows you to be more flexible in achieving the goal. It does not reduce the activity to just checking a box that it was done, but it allows you to continuously work towards improving your health. This would result in more long-lasting improvements as you continue in this process of becoming.