Don’t Have New Year Resolutions – Do This Instead

Posted by Jon on Jan 2, 2012 in Personal Development | 0 comments

The first month of the year (Happy New Year Everyone) is the month we are all fired up to keep to those new year resolutions. Have you noticed that maybe a lot of them are the same as last year?

“Lose weight. Save money.” And so on

Since I graduated from University I stopped having New Year resolutions (as briefly mentioned in my previous post). I realised they were kind of useless and ineffective. Every year we make a promise to ourselves to improve something in our lives; physically, financially, mentally or spiritually but then we get caught up with everyday issues and challenges and lose our focus. Personally I feel this is because we give these resolutions a lower priority to everything else in our lives.

My proposed solution to this, or basically what I do now, is to have goals…yep, that’s it. You may think goals and resolutions are the same thing but they are not. Goals are more long-term, they can span over many years while New Year resolutions, to me, seem like a “quick-fix” sort of thing. Goals can give your life purpose, while resolutions just give you something to do (or not to do).

When most people break their New Year resolutions they tend to quit and leave them until the next 1^st January but when people have a setback in achieving their goals they tend to persist more and find a solution to get them back on track.

Setting goals is not enough though, they need to be backed by a “burning desire” (as Napoleon Hill always says), which means your goals have to be something that no matter what happened you would still stay on the path towards achieving them.

“People with goals succeed because they know where they are going…It’s as simple as that.” – Earl Nightingale

Watch a short video on goal setting here and let me know in the comments what your goals are 🙂

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Jon

Founder and Blogger of Good Thoughts About Life (GTAL), based in Manchester (UK). Passionate about personal growth and the universal laws. Check out the "About Jon" page for his story.