How to Set New Year’s Goals You Won’t Forget in February

The new year is upon us, which means another set of resolutions we hope to fulfill.

Emphasis on the word “hope.” If you often find yourself unable to complete your new year’s resolutions, don’t feel too bad: You are one of the 80 percent who have the same yearly dilemma. Believe us when we say, it’s not you that is the problem—it’s those resolutions. Forcing oneself to adhere to life-changing goals starting on the first day of January sets us up for imminent failure and disappointment.New year’s resolutions trace to the days of the Babylonians, before humans worried about going to the gym 5 days a week or spending more time on self-care rituals, and it’s evolved into a stressful tradition that mostly conjures feelings of dread and self-loathing.

If you’re hoping this year will be the year you see through your resolutions, we humbly offer these tips below to help you realize your goals and feel like a champion. Remember: No matter what happens, don’t be too hard on yourself.

First and foremost: Keep your goals tiny.

Setting out with large, unattainable goals sets you up for failure. Consider starting with small, incremental goals. Heck, maybe even start with ONE goal. Is going to the gym your main objective in the new year? Consider starting January with one visit to the gym each week. Once you develop a habit of going, see if you can ramp it up to two times a week in February, and three times a week in March. If February and March come around and you can still only visit the gym one day each week, that’s ok. Don’t give up and don’t beat yourself up. Think about it—going to the gym one day a week is way better than stopping and not going to the gym at all. The same goes for weight loss, another popular resolution. Instead of thinking, “I want to lose 25 pounds this year,” think more along the lines of, “I’m going to lose two pounds in January, another two in February, and so on. By the end of the year, that’s 24 pounds. But if you only lose 10 pounds in the entire year, that’s still 10 pounds you wouldn’t have lost otherwise.

Tell your goals to the world.

By sharing your goals with your friends, family, co-workers or social media networks, you are bringing them into your circle of accountability. Think about it: Now that everyone knows, you don’t want to fail and hide your face in shame at the next family reunion or office party, right? Much like activity trackers and competition apps, having a secondary party that you must “report” to forces you to keep at your goals. This might not be the right fit for everyone though. If you’re the sort of person who doesn’t respond well to external input, it is ok to also keep your goals to yourself too.

Keep your goals SMART.

The New York Times recommends following the SMART approach to following goals: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. With specific, you should make your goals detailed versus generalized. For example, instead of thinking, “I want to save money in the new year,” think more along the lines of, “I want to put aside $200 each month and slowly build from there.” As for measurable, the Times recommends tracking your progress with photos or a tracking app. Achievable is similar to specific in that you should keep your goals small and doable. Relevant means making goals that are meaningful to you—not goals that are currently in vogue. And time-bound is the realistic expectation of the progress and completion of your goals.

Jot your goals down.

Why, in the time of awe-inspiring technology that enables us to input our daily life online and in the cloud, would we want to write down our goals? Because the act of physically writing something down helps us better retain whatever it is we’re writing down. There is a lot of science tying writing down your goals with goal achievement. The reason why? According to a Forbes article titled Neuroscience Explains Why you Need to Write Down Your Goals if You Actually Want to Achieve Them, we better retain what we’ve written down due to external storage—such as words on a physical piece of paper—and internal storage such as our hippocampus. When we write words down, those words travel to our brain and are processed and stored in a way that helps us retain them better.

**Incompletion is not a failure—it’s fodder to try again in the future.**As mentioned above, 80 percent of folks do not see through their resolutions. When we do not complete our goals, it is easy for us to feel shame, give up completely, curse our resolutions and never speak of them again. If you find yourself behind on your resolution, we challenge you to keep at it, even if you end up at 70 percent or 20 percent of your original resolution. If that is not possible, try picking up the resolution again the next year, or even in June. Who says you have to start resolutions only on January 1st?! What we’re trying to say is that life happens and plans change, and if you get halfway through the year and your resolution progress is a weird Frankenstein version of itself, you should pat yourself on the back for even getting to that point. Which leads us to…

Give yourself a high five!

Look, attempting or completing goals is difficult. It challenges us in ways we are not used to. Sometimes our goals cause us physical or emotional discomfort. While you’re on your journey of transformation, check-in with yourself, make sure you’re doing ok, and know that you’re human. No matter what happens—you are not a failure. Remember: You’ve got this! We wish you the best of luck with your 2020 resolutions.