Achieving your new year’s resolution

Every beginning of the year, we often hear friends or family members making new year resolutions, some can come quite extensively long list of resolutions. When days go by, you probably lost track or couldn’t be bothered to keep track any of them anymore. According to the US News & World Report noted that 80% of new year’s resolutions tend to fail by February. Now, mocking and roasting other people’s new year resolutions is the in trend. It’s easy to make resolutions like aiming to buy a PPA1M house by this year, bank account to reach at a certain amount and others. By then, when you reach mid year and you still far from reach to your resolution, you begin to give up and park it as next year’s resolutions. So, are you part of that group? Let’s look at a few reasons why you keep failing at making your resolutions a reality.

1. Vague goals

Why most people fail to achieve their goals? That’s because the goals that they have written down is not detailed enough. These are some of the classic examples like ‘lose weight’, ‘run more’, ‘eat healthy’ or ‘read more’. Well, there’s difficulty to follow through your goals that are not clear. With words like ‘more’ and ‘healthy’ are quite subjective and the definition differs for each individual. Perhaps, fore one individual, it could mean to cut down the sugary drinks or fried food. For another person, it could have meant to consist more vegetables in their diet.

2. Unrealistic goals

While it is great to make big goals, but you may not prefer small goals as it doesn’t inspire you to jump out of bed and buzz with energy to start making changes. However, when you have set for unrealistic goals, it can make you demotivated and give up on your goals before you start noticing any changes. There are some classic examples where you love eating rice but you list down as ‘stop eating rice’ in your resolution list. Start asking yourself like how long do you think that is going to last? Then again, are you really going to go the whole year without touching a grain of rice?

3. Too comfortable in your comfort zone

We all like new challenges, we are all extremely complacent and hate being stretched beyond our very own comfort zones. While you wish you could travel more, but you have difficulties changing your spending habits to start saving. While you wish you could have gone to the gym more often, but it is after work and it is so much easier to just go home. This is where you have to do what is right instead of what is easy and convenient. Towards the end of the day, you reap what you sow. The more you splurge on bubble milk tea, the harder it is for you to save up for your trip to Europe.

4. Money factor

Money does bring you happiness because it is another factor why most people delayed taking actions towards their goals. They want to join the gym, but they cannot fork out RM250 every month. Though they want to eat healthily but fruits are more expensive than a meal at McDonald. They want to take the initiative to learn new language but the course fee is higher than your rent. What do you do?

Here’s how you can achieve new year’s resolutions.

1. Be super specific with your goals - for example, if you want to lose weight, quantify it to ‘lose 5kg in two months by running 5km every week’.

2. Be realistic - To save money, you can start by saving in small amount. If your ultimate goal is to save up to RM1,000, you can start saving RM150 on monthly basis. If you love shopping, don’t be afraid to look for discount or promo codes or wait for a sale. There are sites that compile those codes for your internet shopping.

3. Don’t be over ambitious - For example, if you want to change your diet by cutting rice, you could start off by cutting off rice on some days of the week. You can even substitute the rice with healthier options like quinoa, brown rice or rice noodles. Get your friends to support you in your habit changing.