How to Meet Your Goals for the New Year

Have you made any new resolutions or goals for this year? Now that we are more than a week into the new year, you may be having various thoughts and feelings about how you are doing, and whether or not you are measuring up to the goals that you had for yourself.

Sometimes starting new things can be really rocky — it’s hard to create new habits, especially when they are things that don’t necessarily feel pleasant or enjoyable in the moment. It’s okay to have patience for that part of your experience. Having patience doesn’t have to mean that you are giving up. Sometimes acknowledging the difficulty and validating what you feel can help you to accept those feelings and then be able to move forward with what you need to do to meet your goals.

Post found on Instagram, from user @WholesomeMeme

It can also feel frustrating when what feels like your “best” doesn’t look the same from day to day. Did you really try your best today if you didn’t do as well as you did yesterday? It’s very possible that you did. We often think of our “best” as being at one static level, but really, it can change quite a bit from day to day. And doing less than you did another day does not mean that you were not doing the best that you could.

Let’s use exercise as an example. Maybe your goal is to exercise for thirty minutes per day. There might be some days when you are able to reach that goal, or even surpass it. But there might be other days when you are only able to do fifteen or twenty minutes, or even when you don’t find time to exercise at all. It is possible that you tried your best on all of these days; maybe on some days you had more or less energy than others, were sore from your previous workout, or your schedule didn’t allow you to exercise that day. It doesn’t have to mean that you did not try as much as you could on each of those days.

Of course, in addition to being patient with ourselves and recognize our efforts, it’s important to be honest with ourselves about what gets in the way of reaching our goals.

If you are consistently finding that you are falling short of your goals, what is getting in the way? Maybe there are things that you could change to make meeting your goals more possible. Going back to our exercise example, maybe changing the time of day or the type of exercise that you are doing will make it more likely that you will complete those thirty minutes.

Or maybe the goal itself needs to change. Sometimes when we create new goals for ourselves, we want to do things that might be a bit too much for us right now. They may be excellent things to work toward, but if they are too far away, we are more likely to give up. One way to work with this is to break the goals up into small pieces. So maybe exercising for thirty minutes a day can be your goal for the end of this year, and you can think about the steps you can take now to work towards it. For example, you could try exercising fifteen minutes every other day for now, and when you have mastered that you can work on something slightly harder. The idea is that you want to have steps that feel achievable. It’s so tempting to want to meet your ultimate goal right away, but setting small goals is often more effective, and it gives you little successes to be proud of along the way.

Struggling to meet your goals for the new year or any time of the year doesn’t mean that you need to give up. Maybe it just means that you would benefit from changing your approach and how you see yourself.