Setting SMART Resolutions for the New Year
How adjusting the way I looked at my New Year’s Resolutions helped me succeed (so far) in 2021
As we closed out 2020 and ventured into 2021, my social media feeds were filled with the different resolution setting mindsets that come with the start of a New Year.
Don’t set goals for the New Year. Why do you need a specific date to start reaching for your goals?
Sharing your New Year’s Resolution will make them more attainable. Comment below!
Have you tried the Whole30/Keto Diet/Most Recent Fad Diet? You should start it January 1 as a clean start!
You are beautiful just the way you are! Don’t start your New Year with a Fad Diet!
Every year, it’s a never ending line of should’s and should not’s by people who don’t know you as well as you know you. Personally, I like New Year’s Resolutions. I like the idea that we all share our goals and our dreams for the next year, even if it doesn’t always pan out the way we hope.
I didn’t set resolutions for myself for a couple years. In 2015 and 2016, I selected a word of the year that would “guide all my actions.” While it was sweet in theory, the execution was usually pretty flawed.
In 2016, as I entered the world of big kid jobs and started my career as a marketing professional, I tried to follow the guidance of the principles I was using every day and set SMART goals. According to Simple Marketing Now (and all of my college textbooks), SMART stands for “Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-Bound.”
From 2017 to 2019, this really helped me create more achievable goals, but as so many of us do, I found myself still falling short of my resolutions. As a result, I gave up on setting New Year’s Resolutions in 2020 (which in hindsight was definitely for the best), and decided I would just achieve whatever was within my reach moving through the year.
But I missed my resolution setting tradition, and I missed feeling like I was apart of a national movement to better myself going into the New Year. So I started thinking about why I struggled to succeed with marketing’s SMART goals, and how I could set goals that didn’t make me feel like a failure if I missed the mark. As a result, I came up with my own SMART principles for setting goals, and applied them to my resolutions for the year.
The first question I wanted to confront was “why” — why did my SMART resolutions fail for so many years? I was following the rules. The goals I set were Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-Bound. I dug out some old journals to see what some of the goals were, and I was sure that I had done them correctly.
In 2017, I resolved to go to the gym 3 times a week. I had already signed up for a gym that was right near my work, I was going 3 times a week most weeks anyway, I set aside time in my schedule (and even wrote the times in my planner), and I set myself up to succeed. However, after the first couple of weeks, those time frames started to slip by without a visit to the gym. Then, I got sick and I was down for 3 weeks with a cough. After that, I was never able to get back into a rhythm. I had failed and given up my goal by March, and I started going to the gym “just whenever.”
In 2018, I resolved to wake up every morning at 5 AM to study for the LSAT for an hour and a half before work. The goal was specific. I was able to measure how much time I had spent studying and how often I was getting up at 5 AM. I was already waking up at 6 AM and going to bed at 10 PM, so what would be the big deal with pushing that back an hour, making the goal attainable. I was set to take the LSAT in June 2018, meaning that I had a relevant time-frame that was time-bound. And yet, those 5 AM’s started turning into 6 AM’s around February. I started only getting 30 minutes to read through my study books, meaning I didn’t take any notes (which is my best way of learning). And by the time I took my first LSAT, I had clocked probably only 70 hours of studying, just under half of the recommended study time for the LSAT.
In 2019, I resolved to read for at least 30 minutes. I made a list of about 20 books I wanted to read that I already owned, I had a new daily devotional that I wanted to start. It was a specific goal that I could measure as I read more books. It shouldn’t have been difficult — it just meant I had to turn off the TV 30 minutes before I got into bed. I missed reading, so it was relevant to what I wanted to achieve for the year in terms of personal goals. But again, by March, burn-out from work caught up with me. I wasn’t able to get up before work to read, and I was again watching TV until the moment I collapsed into bed. I even tried to take a book to work with me to try and encourage a 30 minute lunch break, but those 30 minutes quickly shrank from 30 minutes to 15 minutes to 10 minutes to a quick snack on my way to put out another fire.
As I looked at all of these resolutions, I realized the common element — humanity. I was trying to make myself a machine, a cog in a wheel that wasn’t built for the complexity of human error and human emotion. If I couldn’t make my goal last all year, I would feel defeated and give up completely. I could not connect to these goals because they felt so foreign and so detached from the emotional aspects of setting New Year’s Resolutions. I was making myself better, but to what end? For 2021, I decided I would make resolutions again, but using my own SMART acronym.
To start the ritual of setting New Year’s resolutions for 2021, I tried to find a way to set goals that were attainable but added in more of the human emotion and human error. What were the biggest errors I had seen in my previous attempts that I could correct moving forward.
First, the biggest mistake I made was the loftiness of my goals. I had said “I could do that if I just dedicate to it.” But each year I found myself falling short. Each time, even though I could do it, I found the lack of flexibility in my own rules exhausting and repressive. I would stumble because I put too much pressure on myself for perfection.
The other issue was that I didn’t actually enjoy any of the results of my goals. I put going to the gym on my 2017 resolution list because my boss at the time would adjust her schedule to be at the gym and go almost every day. I felt that in order to keep up, I needed to be at the gym more too.
Based on these two big issues, I came up with my own definition of SMART that has helped me prepare my New Year’s resolutions this year.
Start with what you enjoy. I believe that in order to be successful with any New Year’s resolutions, you need to start with what actually brings you joy. Currently, I am actually enjoying reading again, mostly because I stopped worrying about reading books that were academically acclaimed or would increase my knowledge on a “relevant” subject. The issue with 2019’s reading goal was that it was that I wasn’t reading anything I actually enjoyed- I was only reading what I should read. I also know I enjoy spending time with my pets, running around with my 2 year old “niece” (family-friend that is basically family), and taking mountain bound adventures with my partner and with my besties.
Make your goals flexible. Rather than setting strict time goals or hitting a certain number of any activity within a small period of time, I am going to try and give myself a little more wiggle room to hit average goals. At the same time, I won’t goals that are too vague either. While “more” or “less” is a good place to start, it’s more attainable to know where you are starting and go from there. I also think goal flexibility comes in the form of setting monthly or weekly goals for goals that seem to lofty for a whole year.
Ask a friend to come along for the ride. Part of the reason my reading has increased in the last few months is because I have started to talking to friends about books again. We talk, we exchange, we do book groups. We make it a community effort. I most enjoyed going to the gym when I had friends who went there too. Even if we didn’t agree to go at the same time, we would run into each other and just make the best of the a happy coincidence. You can achieve so much on your own, but part of the joy of New Year’s resolutions is knowing you are part of something more. Why don’t you make your personal goals feel like that too?
Reach just a little. In a similar vein to making my goals flexible, I want to make it a reach. Start with where you are, and reach just a little. For example, maybe you’re currently drinking 4 cups of coffee every day. Rather than trying to cut yourself down to 1 or 2 cups a day, start smaller, and say “instead of 28 cups of coffee each week, I will only drink 20.” That gives you flexibility in case there is a day where you drink more, but it also just a bit of a reach beyond your normal habits.
Take the small victories. Enjoy your successes! Come up with a system for celebrating when you make a small step in the right direction. I think the problem with my previous attempts at SMART resolutions was I got discouraged when I failed, and I wasn’t taking time to praise myself for when I was doing an awesome job.
Based on this new definition of SMART resolutions, I have set my resolutions for the year:
- In 2020, I read 12 new books (an average of 1 book per month). In 2021, I resolve to read 18 new books. I am having so much fun reading again, and I already have 3 books on my shelf from friends that I know we will get to talk about once I finish them. This is a bit more of a reach from what I did last year, but I know that I can do it! Each time I finish a book, I will celebrate by either passing it along to someone else to read or setting up a time to talk about it with the person who recommended it to me.
- In 2020, I went to 3 new National Parks. This year, I resolve to go to 3 different National Parks or National Forests. One of the joys of living in Colorado is proximity to the mountains and to so many beautiful places. I want to continue to explore the area I live in, and maybe go just beyond. My partner and I love taking trips together, and we have already started talking about trips to Utah for next year to visit the National Parks in that state that we missed when we drove through in 2020. This goal is full of adventure, and it gives me the opportunity to either go once a quarter, OR to do 3 national parks in one trip.
While these are great year long goals, the key to my SMART acronym was flexibility and learning to be more forgiving. I decided to test this new formula on a smaller basis, so for the month of January, I set small goals that would help me achieve long-term success. I had the following three goals for January:
- Walk 10 miles with my dog over the course of the month. I used the SMART method to decide on setting this goal, and I achieved this goal by focusing on the following:
- Start with what you enjoy. I love my dog. She spending time with her is one of my favorite things to do, and it getting outside in the sun with her always boosts my mood. I know that when I get stressed, my time with her and my time outside goes down, so this goal would get me back in the habit of doing something I enjoy.
- Make your goals flexible. By setting a goal of 10 miles over the course of the month, it gave me a bit of flexibility in how I got to 10 miles. Rather than limiting myself to “3 times a week” or “10 minutes a day”, this gave me the flexibility to walk her more or less within my schedule.
- Ask a friend to come along for the ride. This one was not as vital to walking the dog, as I consider her a friend, but I would plan longer walks for times when I could call my friends or bring my partner along for the ride.
- Reach just a little. I initially planned to just do 5 miles, but that seemed too easy. At the end of December, I tracked my average walk length, and I was walking an average of .75 miles when I took the dog out. I knew that walking her about 3 times a week would be 12 times in the month, which would be equal to 9 miles. I figured that by hitting an even 10 miles, I would be reaching just beyond the bounds of “normal” to improve my health and my relationship with my dog.
- Take the small victories. As a spoiler, I achieved my goal — and then some! I walked 12 miles with my dog over the course of January. Some weeks I did more, some weeks I did less. On the day we reached 10 miles, I gave my dog a treat at the end of our walk, and I added a sticker to my planner to celebrate!
I was really excited to see how changing the way I thought about my goals aided me in creating a healthier relationship with my New Year’s resolutions. I was able to create SMART, achievable goals that helped me feel smarter, healthier and more in control of my life. It even helped me come up with a word for the year — Purpose. In 2021, I believe that pushing forward with purpose and creating attainable goals will help me to feel more accomplished. I have already set more goals for February 2021, and I have started moving toward my yearly goals. I have finished book 1, and I passed it along to my best friend. I believe that SMART goals can help more people greet the New Year with the joy of creating a fresh start.
