How to Make New Year's Resolutions That Stick

Great post, thank you. It goes with what I came across recently:

5 steps to making sure you keep you new year's resolution:

"People who kept their resolutions tended to have broken their goal into smaller steps and rewarded themselves when they achieved one of these. They also told their friends about their goals, focused on the benefits of success and kept a diary of their progress.


"People who planned a series of smaller goals had an average success rate of 35%, while those who followed all five of the above strategies had a 50% chance of success."

Happy 2010

Another tip you can add to the list is to never set a goal that's too high and not achievable. You might only get disappointed in the end and might not encourage you to come up with another New Year's resolution altogether.

Set the bar high ~ and start jumping ~

[QUOTE=RichPirate;1556215]Hey Warriors,

I just wanted to share one of the most helpful things I've learned about success and self improvement:

Learn to *how* to set well defined goals.

A lot of people will sit down this time of year and come up with goals such as:

"I will lose weight"
"I will start my own business"
"I will get a girlfriend/boyfriend"

These are all great things to have in the new year, but if these are your goals, you have already set yourself up for failure. You need to learn how to set goals that turn in to results.

Here are 2 things that I consider when setting any goal:

1. Make sure there are well defined steps that can be taken

The number one thing that prevents most people from succeeding at their goals is that they set goals that don't involve well defined steps that they themselves can take.

If your goal can't be broken down in to actions that you can take, come up with a new goal. Take the old goal and break it down as far as you can, then stop.

2. Know how you will know when your goal is completed

With every goal ask your self, "How will I know when my goal is completed". For example, if your goal is "to start a business", you might answer the question like this, "I will know when my goal is completed when I have at least 3 well researched websites live and SEOed".

Notice how I didn't say , "...when I am making $5000 a month in profit". Even if this is what I really want, when setting a well defined goal it is important to confine it to actions that *you* can take. Making profit depends on the actions of others.

The trick is to define your goal so well that if you follow the step you have laid out for yourself you will be likely to see the kind of profit you want. But, the profit itself is not the goal.

I hope this helps all of you who are setting goals for the new year. Do any of you have some more tips for goal setting?[/QUOTE


I really appreciated this post. It helped me to understand why my resolutions were a miserable failure and included great suggestions for making them effective. Thanks so much!

"People with goals succeed because they know where they're going." - Earl Nightingale

That's not goal setting, that's project management and a sure way of limiting your success.
Goals should seem impossible dreams. If you believe that you will achieve them, you will. You may not know how, but the answer will appear often from the most unlikely source.

If you are driven and hit a problem, a solution will appear. Perhaps from a chance encounter, or a book lying in the dentist waiting room.

Read some of the myriad of info about "The Law Of Attraction". That is goal setting and it works. The first lesson is dream big!

People fail with New Year resolutions simply because they make them things they feel they should do, rather than things they want to do and they don't express them in a positive manner. I will lose weight would be better expressed as I will become fitter and more attractive looking. Thats nice and positive and something worth working towards.

I agree about new year's resolutions. They should stick. I created a free report that was inspired by my appearance on the Dr. Oz show about the 7 deadly habits of setting new year's resolutions.

You can get a copy here: New Year's Resolutions | Life Makeover | Michelle Greene International

I think you have to be honest with yourself and make realistic goals