New Year’s celebrates the year passed and the year to come. For many, it’s also a time for setting goals to better themselves in the new year. Unfortunately, setting a goal and actually achieving it, as many find, are two very different things. The good news is that, with a little knowledge about setting good goals and staying disciplined in achieving them, you can better your odds in seeing your accomplishments through.

Make Your Goal Measurable and Achievable

One of the biggest problems resolution setters make is taking on a goal that is too lofty and vague. Setting a huge resolution for yourself and not having a good game plan for accomplishing it is like showing up to Mount Everest with no training. This doesn’t mean that you need to throw your goal away entirely; rather, break the goal out into steps that easier for you to achieve. It helps to know when you’ve accomplished your goal too, so instead than saying something like, “I want to eat more healthy foods,” focus on something more concrete like, “I will eat a salad every day for lunch.”

Keep Track of Your Progress

Usually, the first week in trying to achieve a goal is the easiest. That’s when you’re still riding the New Year’s high, bright and eager to accomplish your goal. Life quickly sets in, however, and after a few weeks back in your old routines, it’s easy to drop your goal out of disinterest or feelings of little accomplishment. Big goals take time to achieve, so tracking your progress, whether it’s through a diary or an app, can show you how far you’ve come and how far you’ve still got to go.  

Focus on the Process, Not the Product

It’s easy to get too caught up in the end-point of your resolution that you forget about the journey. Thinking only about your goal, and how much you want to achieve it, can make you feel like you aren’t making good progress on your resolution. Shifting your focus to the small accomplishments you make toward your goal each day goes hand-in-hand with the benefits of keeping a journal. Instead of feeling that you’re making incremental, inconsequential progress toward seeing your resolution through, you’ll feel triumphant in meeting the smaller goalposts you’ve set for yourself. And soon enough, you’ll see your resolution through.

Enlist a Partner

Even the most difficult tasks are a little bit easier when you’ve got someone to motivate you and share in your successes. That’s why it might be a good idea to get a loved one or a small group to all take part in the same resolution. Plus, it never hurts to be accountable for sticking up to your end of the bargain. Be careful about telling everyone about your goal, however. Studies have shown that people who tell all their friends and family about the goal they hope to achieve attain a false sense of accomplishment, fooling them into falling right back into their bad habit!

Setting and keeping resolutions will be a little more manageable if you keep these tips in mind, but nobody ever said it was easy. It’s also important to remember that breaking your resolution isn’t the end of the world. Don’t let one slip-up be the thing that derails your progress. Instead, let it be a learning opportunity on your way to a better self!