MAKING RESOLUTIONS

MAKING RESOLUTIONS

It’s the beginning of a much awaited new year after the yuletide full of celebrations, meeting families, old friends and lots more, a time most wish would last longer. As the old year runs out, we all begin to look back at our achievements from the very beginning of the year and might be disappointed we hardly met the goals we set for ourselves. Reacting to the former and the determination to make it worthwhile and better, we make resolutions as the dawn of a new year unmasks particularly to serve as personal road map for the year.

Is it right to posit from experience that most people don't keep their resolutions? The reply to this seems to be in the affirmative. Thus, in the long run our resolutions don’t have a high success rate. Unfortunately for many, it has become a patterned habit determining to follow through on our goals from the first day of the year with excitement and energy, hoping the new year will be different from the last, but we digress from these decisions much later, abandoning our goals altogether. If this is the case, why do we then continually make resolutions year in year out?

One major reason is the allure of starting from scratch as the beginning offers a fresh start and a clean slate. This is in addition to the aura of hope it brings with it as it serves as a yardstick to quantify what we wish for ourselves and a means of erasing errors of the past year.

Another is that timing is important in determining whether or not we succeed. This sensibility has been proved to even influence the stock market in a phenomenon known as the January Effect, where the market always performs better than average at the beginning of a year simply due to optimism. At the start of a new year, investors take a rosier view of the future and bid up uncertain stocks which subsequently fall back to their real value.

Research and experience has shown that people fail to meet their resolutions because they have overestimated their own abilities, underestimated the time and effort involved in staying the course, or have an exaggerated view of the effect that the change would have on their lives.  Psychologists Janet Polivy and Peter Herman term this the false-hope syndrome: unrealistic expectations about our ability to change, followed closely by the dashing of our initially high aspirations.

Nothing can negatively affect the start of a new year like a long list of promises we probably know we are going to break. To guard against this, proper preparation, a little care and dogged determination are what we need to stick to and achieve our resolutions without much ado. The following rules are guide to making achievable resolutions;

1 Choose a few 

Some advocates that the way to succeed with new year’s resolutions is to pick a single goal attainable in a series of manageable steps, but most of us are working with backlog of underachievement and a limited number of new years ahead of us. Thus it is better to neither choose too many nor a single resolution. Draw up a list of a few resolutions.

2 Avoid making resolutions under influence

Any resolution made while under influence of drug, alcohol or emotional strain on new year’s eve and festive times doesn’t count due to the fact that in moment of exuberance, it is easy to forget how much we wont feel like working towards our goals.

3 Be realistic

Making resolutions is all about setting achievable, incremental targets and sticking to them. It is good to dream but we should not dream unrealistically. Naturally, if we set more realistic goals, we are more likely to succeed. Dream reasonably!

4 Aim for a preponderance of win-win resolutions

The win-lose type of resolution is exactly the sort of rigid and high-risk proposition. we can set equally preposterous goals that are still worthwhile when we fail at them. For instance, one may resolve to read 40 books over the course of the year. It never sounds that hard during the first quarter, but when at the end of the third quarter we have only read 10, the final stretch begins to look daunting. However, even if we only manage 15 books in 2017, we are still 15 books wiser than we were at the end of 2016.

5 Lower your expectations

Wanting to make resolutions is a good thing, the fact that people keep making resolutions even when they do not always follow through ultimately means that they have hope and a certain level of belief in their ability to change and be more of who they really want to be.

Above all it is good and pertinent to make resolutions, research confirms that setting resolutions can get you closer to your goals. One study found that 46 percent of individuals who made resolutions were successful compared to 4 percent who wanted to achieve a certain goal and considered it but didn’t actually create a resolution. Make your goals come true!