New Year’s Resolutions: How to Keep Them (For Realsies)

Well folks, it’s January 4th. How are those new year’s resolutions coming along? Honestly, I gave up on setting new year’s resolutions a while ago because I could never keep it up! (Along with most of the world, according to statistics.) However, I can say confidently that I am still improving at a steady clip, even if I didn’t work out on January 1st. (Is that allowed?)

To prove that I have been working on goals for many moons, here are potato-covered post-it notes that I used to track a goal in high school. That goal is still a work in progress. Heh

This picture doesn’t have to do with goals, but I found it and that was a fun night doing long multiplication! I tell you what!

*viewer discretion advised* To prove that sometimes I put blood, sweat, and tears into my goals. And that I sometimes trip on cement. Ees for fun.

This girl, less than a week ago, finally riding the habit-setting train! (Along with other various trains)

I’ve learned a lot about goal-setting in my day. I have studied many a self-improvement book, fueled by a constant (sometimes overwhelming) desire to be better. I have tried (emphasis on tried) to achieve goals since I was a wee one. Finally, FINALLY, in the past few months, I’ve been blessed to figure out some principles that work! To prove my success, I cite that these principles have helped me exercise more, start meal planning, serve more, study my scriptures more, and pound through to-do lists consistently for the past five months and for the foreseeable future with very little effort. I’ve set things up so that my habits stay in tact even when interruptions like getting sick or holidays happen. These habits are my solid base in life now despite distractions, rather than being a herd of cats! (I would be okay to have a herd of cats too, though.)

First, four guiding principles:

1. One of the most important things I learned from my public health degree is that one big key to success is removing as many barriers as possible. It’s okay for your goal to be convenient! You don’t get extra points for making things hard.
2. If there is one vital, cannot-succeed-without-it principle of goal-setting, it is sustainability. Is your new sugar-free, gluten-free, flavor-free diet something you see yourself easily doing every day from when you started it last week to five years from now, even if a chocolate cake walks past? (The answer is no.) Your goals have to be so sustainable that you can see yourself keeping them for the rest of your life and being able to put them on autopilot so that you can focus on new goals. This might mean toning your goal down for now so that you can keep the effort up.
3. It’s not about setting goals. It’s about creating habits. Goals have an endpoint. I don’t want there to be an endpoint. So I set up habits instead. At first I fought against this principle because I thought that I needed something to work towards for motivation. I’ve come to accept it though! Gretchen Rubin mentions, for example, that someone might be training to run a race and be really active, but once the race is finished, the motivation is gone and they struggle to exercise. That has definitely happened to me in the past.
4. Truly, the best way to keep your habits rolling is for them to be so useful that you don’t want to go back to how you used to do things. It’s like progressing from fire to electricity!
5. Circumstances change but our habits don’t have to. For example, I just finished college and I’m about to start working full-time. I’m not going to be able to keep these habits in the same way, but I can keep them by tweaking how to make them work with my circumstances.

Okay, so what is my method? I choose a habit that I want to establish for the month. I write it down (in the Notes section my phone for easy reference and editing, but y’all could write yours on the wall with chocolate pudding if you want) and then I make a bullet point list of all the barriers that keep me from my habit. Then I figure out ways to annilihate each of those barriers! I spend the month figuring out how to break down the barriers and voila, my habit is now basically on autopilot. I give myself a month to create a habit, which is an easy amount of time to measure, gives me plenty of time to break down barriers, and gives me time to test things out and tweak as needed. Y’all could measure it however y’all want though, y’all.

To illustrate my method, here is how I set up my very first habit of meal planning. I used to say that if something took longer to make than it took to eat, it wasn’t worth it! There seemed to be so much effort required for one meal. This is how I finally converted to being an aspiring chef (lolz).

October: meal planning

• Barrier: not knowing what to make
• Solution: Create a meal rotation. Choose seven types of food you normally eat (Mexican food, chicken, slow cooker meals, etc.), assign them to a day of the week (Mexican food Mondays, slow cooker Sundays, for example), and then choose four recipes that fall under those categories. Now you have 28 meals and a month’s worth of recipes that you can repeat every month! Boom. Autopilot.
• Not having the ingredients I need
• On a specific day once a week, plan what you’ll eat for the entire week based on your categories, look at the ingredients, and write down a shopping list of all the things you’ll need that you don’t already have.
• Being in the store for a long time
• Some may call me nit-picky, but I go so far as to organize my shopping list on my phone so that every item is in order from when I walk into the store to the end and I erase it as I go. It helps me enjoy getting groceries more when I don’t have to backtrack five times in the store.
• Stressed while making it
• I put all my ingredients out on the counter before I start and prep all the food before I start cooking any of it. Some people can multitask...I, however, only succeed at burning something while trying to chop something else up.
• Being too tired to cook
• I eventually modified my habit to be more sustainable by deciding to only cook about four days a week instead of seven. I couldn’t eat all those leftovers anyways and it was cheaper this way! I chose the specific days of the week based on which ones didn’t already have things scheduled in the evening.
• Cost
• Start your meal planning by looking at what you already have. You can search for a recipe based on the ingredients you have. (50-pack of corn tortillas, I’m looking at you.)

Intense? Perhaps. Effective? Absolutely. I have made more real meals in the past few months than I have in the rest of my life. Which makes me wonder how I have survived this long. The point is, this method works!! If any of you want help brainstorming how to make a habit work, holla back atcho girl. I want to put my years of gathering information and cat memes to use!