How To Make Your New Year’s Resolutions Fun and Achievable
Why not make a couple of resolutions you'll enjoy and achieve for a change
Nothing worth having is easy to achieve, is it?
No pain, no gain — that’s the battle cry our teachers and parents taught us. So we’re all busy hustling our way to a better life.
New Year is the perfect time to give yourself another push. So, naturally, your New Year’s resolutions focus on all the hard things you want to accomplish. All the things you don’t like about yourself. All your little flaws and bad habits.
And every year in February — maybe March if you have a lot of willpower — you give up. It’s just too exhausting to keep fighting with your unwilling self.
One year later, you’re in the exact same place, and come January, you try again.
What if instead of trying to eliminate your faults, you did more of the “easy” things? The things you’re good at?
Wouldn’t change be so much easier?
Focusing on failures and eradicating faults rather than building strengths is a common strategy. And it’s a lucrative one, too. A billion-dollar industry of self-optimization gurus thrives on making you and me feel not good enough.
Marketdata estimates that the self-improvement market in the U.S. was worth $13.4 billion in 2022.
They offer books, talks, and workshops that all promise that you‘ll be more successful and happier if only you just get rid of this or that annoying habit. If you get up earlier, work harder, get better at languages or become more productive.
And it’s easy to fall prey. We all want to be better, healthier, more beautiful, more likable, more successful or richer. So we get caught up in this never-ending, thankless quest for self-improvement.
You are told again and again that you can only be successful if you eliminate your weaknesses and close the gaps in your abilities.
But what do you think would happen if you focused on what you’re already good at for a change? Wouldn’t you have a head start? For once, you wouldn’t be starting in the basement, and you’d surely have more fun.
Plus, your chances of being successful would be much higher.
This may sound like wishful thinking or an attempt to get out of doing the hard work. It’s not. There is research that supports this approach.
As Marcus Buckingham, a world-renowned talent development coach, explains:
People will tell you that the best way to grow at work is to focus on your weaknesses. That’s not true. If you want to grow, you need to focus on skills and practices that are already strong. Those strengths, rather than your weaknesses, should guide your improvement.
Look at yourself. You already have unique strengths and things you’re naturally good at that you can harness to achieve more.
Why waste all your energy on being perfect at things you don’t enjoy? Why punish yourself by constantly forcing yourself to do something you don’t want to do?
What if this year you made New Year’s resolutions that focus on your strengths instead of your weaknesses?
Let’s take exercise as an example. Sure, we all know it’s good for us, and we should do it more. But why do we feel it can’t be enjoyable?
If your resolution is “I’ll go to the gym regularly,” but you despise going to the gym, it’s easy to tell how this will end.
But maybe you love to dance.
Dancing is exercise. And it’s a lot of fun. Why not make a resolution about dancing more? Make yourself a 45-minute mix tape with music you love and resolve to dance to it three times a week.
Problem solved, more exercise and more fun at the same time.
Do you want to learn a new language this year or brush up on your forgotten language skills? But when it’s time to study, would you rather play games on your cell phone than dust off your old textbooks?
Why don’t you get a language app with gamification features for your phone? I downloaded Duolingo to brush up on my poor school French after a trip to Morocco just over a year ago.
I’m now on a 383-day streak; I’ve learned 3385 words and spent almost 5000 minutes learning French.
Not because I have so much willpower but because the app has all these competitions, rewards, and challenges that keep me coming back every day. I would never have achieved this with a textbook.
I did it because it wasn’t hard.
Want to eat healthier? I bet you’ve seen all the amazing meal prep videos on TikTok and are ready to prep yourself to the “new you” starting January 2.
My recommendation? Don’t do it. Not only is it not sustainable — you’ll spend all your Sundays cooking until you can’t do it anymore — you’ll likely throw out half the prepped healthy food at the end of the week.
Why? Because when your healthy Teriyaki chicken dinner doesn’t look tempting anymore on Wednesday, you’ll order takeaway instead. There’s only so many times you’ll want to eat the same meal.
Try doing something easy. Instead of resolving to meal-prep and eat super healthy in the new year, just vow to eat some extra fruit or vegetable every day. Start small. Promise yourself to swap one snack a day with some healthy option for 2 weeks and increase that step by step.
And watch your healthy eating habits steadily improve as your healthy eating habits slowly crowd out the unhealthy ones.
Contrary to popular belief, life doesn’t have to be hard.
Think about it. If you’re working on getting good at something you find difficult and don’t enjoy, you’re not only competing with people who are already good at it but also with all the things you’d rather be doing instead.
That’s a hard battle to win.
If you focus on things that are easy or build on things you enjoy doing, you’ll likely see small successes quickly. These feelings of success will encourage you to keep doing what you’re doing.
Life is short. There’s no reason to spend it constantly fighting an uphill battle.
So make a resolution for the next year to improve something that you’re already good at and that you enjoy.
Happy Holidays