With every New Year there is inevitably New Year’s Resolutions!! Setting new goals for the upcoming year can be a great way to start fresh and look forward to improving your life in some way. You’ve likely given this much thought, and figuring out what your goals for the New Year are is often the easy part. The challenging part for many is keeping that forward motion going toward achieving those goals – and that’s all about the execution!! It’s been my experience that doing too much too fast is overwhelming and more often than not unsustainable. The secret is making your goals (no matter how lofty) into manageable action steps.
Many find that the very first task of writing down one long-term (a year or so) goal is a great place to start. Then under that you write three short-term goals toward that step. Here’s where it’s important to then list small, specific, manageable action steps that you can begin today to support positive behavior changes. An example might look like this:
Long-Term Goal –
25 pound weight loss in one year
Short-Term Goals (toward long term goal) –
1. Incorporate more physical activity/exercise
2. Reduce/Eliminate processed & sugary junk foods
3. Include more real whole foods in my diet
Specific & Manageable Action Steps
1. Committing to some type of physical activity/movement on Monday/Wednesday/Friday every week for 30 minutes beginning at 6am before work.
2. Replace afternoon sugary coffee drink with unsweetened tea on T/Th.
3. Incorporate five servings of vegetables per day M/W/F.
**The most important part of these actions steps are that they are totally manageable and tasks that you will be able to incorporate to begin to build new habits. Then you re-visit these action steps regularly (perhaps the 1st of every month) and evaluate what is going well and what has been challenging and adjust from there!!
While these goals can look ‘easy’ on paper, it’s not always the case! Making change and sticking with it can be difficult for sure!! There is something very powerful about actually writing down your goals to look at. Keeping your goals handy so you can look at them daily to motivate, evaluate and adjust as needed can be very supportive! Cheers to a healthy & happy New Year ahead – Be Great Feel Well!!
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