How To Stick To New Year’s Resolutions: 9 Tips [Smart & Sure Ways]

Do you want to maintain and achieve your healthy and good resolutions in the new year? In this article you will find tips and examples to achieve this without ‘weak moments’. It’s not going to be easy, but with these tips you will succeed with your new year’s resolutions with courage and strength. Read along…

Tip 1: Apply this essential cliché: what do you want?

There’s a reason this is such a gross cliché. “I don’t want to smoke, snack, stay single …” That doesn’t work, because your whole feeling has turned towards that negative. So focus on what you do want, because then your vibes will also get a boost. You can read why this is so in this article about the pink elephant.

Don’t give energy to something you actually want to get rid of.

Tip 2: Let your good intentions be part of a larger goal

Stop making good intentions and go grander: set an important goal. Such a good resolution … is just an intention. Rather make it a great life goal, because that is much more attractive to work on. Throw all your ‘good intentions’ overboard and simply determine clearly what your big goal is.

Resolutions mainly concern what you are going to do , not what you want to achieve . And which of the two do you think provides the most fuel? To do or to achieve? Indeed: achieving gives you the ‘why’ – the reason behind the intention – and that is where the true motivation, enthusiasm and inspiration lies .

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Tip 3: Be specific in your goal

‘Sports’ is not specific. Nor ‘body pumping’ yet. ‘Body pumping once a week’ comes close. How many hours should it be per week? What are the only valid exceptions? Where are you going to do it? With whom?

You can also be specific in the wrong way: ‘I want to lose 20 kilos this year’ seems perfectly formulated, of course, but it is not a process goal. Your goal must be a process goal, because then it is within reach. For example, a process goal is: ‘This year I took 150 body pump lessons.’ That simply cannot be missed because you can directly influence it yourself, while you cannot directly track your weight yourself.

Here you can read exactly how to set a specific goal.

Tip 4: Visualize achieving the goal

Visualize the second in which you reached your goal in as much detail as possible, as if it were already a reality. Close your eyes for a moment and imagine that you have already achieved your goal. What do you see, hear and feel? Also look back on all the obstacles you had overcome along the way.

The above instruction is a summary of the visualization instruction that you will find in this article about the law of attraction .

Tip 5: Feel the pain & pleasure: how will you feel if you have achieved it and if you have not achieved it?

Imagine you have achieved the goal. What cool and crazy things happen after a month, after two months, after six months? Feel it too. Okay, now do the same, but with the disaster scenario of not achieving the goal. How fat, ugly, dirty, lonely and broke are you then?

I have to do this, otherwise … [doom scenario]

Weird tip? Then read this article with the full explanation of the pain-pleasure principle.  This is the most important tip to create motivation.

Tip 6: Do something too – Take action… now immediately

Immediately take every little action you can do now. Buy your sports gear in advance. Put your gym bag at the door. Block your diary with the class hours in which you will body pump. And when that first day of class arrives, you go to class.

You do not have to start faithfully on January 1. Start yesterday.

Tip 7: Discover your benefit from not succeeding: ‘secondary gain’

Do you know why good intentions fail? Because you get a profit from falling! You then have to fulfill positive intentions … by failing with your good intentions. In other words, staying sick gives you something positive. Hence the name ” sickness gain .”

So ask yourself:

The answer to the above questions is the positive intention. Now that you know the positive intention of failure, you can reframe that positive intention. You can read here how it’s done.

Tip 8: Make the actions towards your goal fun and playful

Think of ways in which you can achieve your goal in a fun, relaxing and playful way. “How can I go to body pump class three times a week, not only because I will reach my annual goal, but also simply because it is so cool to do?”

Tip 9: Ask for help

Really: ask for help.  This makes everything in life easier and more fun, because discipline becomes very difficult when you have to do everything on your own. There is nothing wrong with it: if you never ask for help, you don’t get a special certificate or something … So you only have everything to win and nothing to loose if you ask for help.

To your success!