Founder of Reni Boys. I’ll just be sharing some of my favorites from our blog. www.reniboys.com

Jan 1, 2016

52 Ways to Meet Your New Year’s Resolution

Have you decided on your 2016 New Year’s Resolution?

Of course you have. Choosing our New Year’s Resolutions is the easiest thing we’ve ever done. It’s like having a lucid daydream in which at the end you feel like you have accomplished something. What would I like to have, or be, or do differently in my life? OK, I’ll resolve to do that. Boom resolution done.

Unfortunately deciding our resolutions is quite different than achieving our resolutions. This is usually because our resolutions are a bit vague and have no real measurement of success. Were we healthier this year? Maybe. Were we actually more present in the moment this year? Could have been.

I don’t have some evidence-based formula to ensure we meet our resolutions, but I do think we are approaching this whole thing from the wrong direction, and will be trying something new this year to make my resolutions last past the publication of this blog.

The gist — this year, instead of trying to meet a resolution, let’s try to become more resolute people.

This doesn’t mean not to make a resolution, it just means that they way we go about reaching these goals are a little bit different. Let’s not try to do something, but instead be someone — someone who does that thing we wish to achieve. Resolutions are hard to achieve because they are usually something new or contrary to our regular patterns of life. Being healthier is not just going to the gym, it’s becoming someone who goes to the gym — someone who doesn’t go to happy hour daily or binge watch Peaky Blinders two hours a day, so that they actually have time to go to the gym.

Becoming this resolute person means creating new habits and creating new habits takes consistent repetitive actions.

The frequency of these actions is where we got the title for this blog. There are 52 weeks in a year, which will give us a regular yet comfortable schedule to slowly yet surely create our new habits.

Fifty-two is not the amount of times we should be going to the gym, saving an extra dollar, or reading a page in the newspaper — 52 is the amount of times we should be sitting down and consciously plan out our action steps for the coming week. Choosing a specific day for these planning sessions makes sense, so we’ll be using each Sunday of 2016 to re-resolve to meet our goals and then use that as the extra motivation or course correction needed for the following week.

Becoming resolute is not a one-time thing, or a 52-time thing for that matter, but the more we try, the less we’ll have to try.

Happy New Year!