2026. A new year with endless possibilities and goals for personal commitments and intentions for self-improvement. It wouldn’t be unusual in the month of January to hear the question, “What are your New Year’s resolutions?” with a follow-up inquiry in a few months of “How’s that going for ya?” … to which I would personally make myself invisible because how often have I said “THIS IS GOING TO BE THE YEAR. It’ll be different. I will stick to my resolutions!” But alas, life, and perhaps my lapse of willpower, intervenes.
Achieve Your Goals
So, you must be wondering how we can stick to our resolutions and emerge victorious, ideally self-improved, by the end of the year? In 1981, George T. Doran, who was a consultant and former Director in Corporate Planning for the Washington Water Power Company, introduced the idea of S.M.A.R.T. goals:
- Specific – target a specific area for improvement.
- Measurable – quantify, or suggest, an indicator of progress.
- Assignable – specify who will do it.
- Realistic – state what results can realistically be achieved given available resources.
- Time-related – specify when the result can be achieved.
These can be applicable to short-term (e.g., reading x number of books per month, spending x amount less/month, etc.) or long-term goals (e.g., learning a new language, making healthy lifestyle changes, etc.). The key to ensuring success for long-term resolutions is to focus on sustainable habits that can be broken down into smaller, specific, and more manageable goals. This approach allows us to track and measure our progress while holding ourselves accountable, with room for flexibility. Rigidity makes it easier to fall off the wagon and harder to climb back on. The mantra for goal setting should be twofold: “Yes, you can do this!” but also “Give yourself grace.”
Let’s give a few examples:
- My goal is to improve my budgeting and saving skills this year.
This is a great goal, but too broad. How do we define what is appropriate saving for us? Putting together an Excel sheet of your monthly income versus your expenses allows you to visually see how much you’re debiting and crediting (woof, got hit with some nostalgic memories from accounting class). You can see if there are areas that you can improve saving on, such as going out to eat or miscellaneous expenditures (Target, I see you). Then set a more manageable goal of saving x amount of money per month that’s reasonable based off your current finances. You can always reevaluate and do a check-in every few months to see if this is still plausible for you. And hey, if you had a rough month and needed a shopping spree to bring on some endorphins or maybe life happened and you had to replace your washing machine, you are not a failure. Try again the next month, and the month after that.
2. My goal is to eat healthy and exercise more.
Again, a great goal, but how can we improve our chances of sticking to these lifestyle changes? Remember, making small changes can have big impacts! Perhaps instead of choosing to drink a soda or an alcoholic beverage whenever you go out to eat, you decide on water. Or instead of going out to eat, you choose to cook at home more.
Exercising is ideal, sure, but how do we make this happen? Maybe it means incorporating some sort of movement into your daily routine – taking a family walk before or after dinner. Or maybe it’s possible to wake up at 5:00 AM a few days a week to do a quick workout at home before getting the kids up. Or if you run twice a week, you can try adding a different kind of workout such as strength training, yoga, or Pilates.
The point is you don’t have to make these grand 180-degree changes to achieve your goals. Start small, be specific, figure out how you’ll measure your progress, and be realistic with yourself.
So I have to ask … what’s your New Year’s resolution? How do you plan to achieve your goals?
