Redesigning your New Year's resolutions
Once the holiday season comes to an end, there is something about a fresh start that makes entering the New Year exciting. Along with fresh starts, comes the tradition of creating New Year’s resolutions. While this can be fun for most, it can also be tainted with despair as we think about the failed promises we once made to ourselves.
Roughly 50% of adults will create a New Year’s resolution, and of those, 25% will quit by the end of the first week of January. A third of those individuals will make it through the end of the month. Still, less than 10% of people actually follow through with their resolutions.
Agatha Parks-Savage, EdD, RN, Associate Dean of Graduate Medical Education and Professor of Family and Community Medicine at EVMS, says you should not let these statistics discourage you from your own goals. “Instead," she says, “try re-designing your New Year’s resolutions.”
Parks-Savage further offers these simple guidelines designed to help you become part of the 10% who successfully fulfill their New Year’s resolutions:
Create a mind-set for change.
Creating a mind-set that is flexible to changing situations helps you to become open to the idea for change. Change can be difficult because it goes against what you currently know. Be prepared for feeling apprehensive and accept it as a normal.
Set goals that excite you.
Make the resolution about what you want. Be selfish and just make it all about you. Even better, make it something that gets you excited and helps you stay motivated!
Design goals to be S.M.A.R.T.
It’s easy to come up with a page-long list of thoughts and ideas, but is that realistic? Instead, come up with one or two S.M.A.R.T. goals that are manageable:
Specific: Your goal should be clear. For example, “I will answer new emails within two business days.”
Measurable: Set some sort of quantifiable way to measure whether you are meeting your goal. For example, you could set a goal of answering 85% of new emails within two business days.
Attainable: Your goal should be something that is realistic. “It would be nice to think I could answer 100% of new emails within 2-business days, but that’s not realistic.”
Relevant: The goal needs to have some sort of purposeful meaning to you, or you will lose interest. For example, “I like knowing that others can trust that I will reply to their email messages in a timely manner. This sense of professionalism is important to me.”
Time-sensitive: Set a time frame to achieve this goal. For some, having a deadline is helpful because it integrates into your usual workflow. One great tip I learned is to use the first 30-60 minutes of my workday to answer emails from the night before and to purge out junk mail. To make time for this, I try not to schedule anything on my calendar until after the first hour I am at work.
Whatever your New Year’s resolutions may be, you can’t go wrong with keeping them clear, concise and succinct. Also, find an accountability partner to encourage you to stay on track. Make one or two achievable resolutions which can be reasonably accomplished in a short three to six months. For the remainder of the year, instead of creating a new list of goals, work on refining and retuning the goals you created on New Year’s Day. Good luck!
Agatha Parks-Savage, EdD, LPC, RN, is a Licensed Professional Counselor, Professor of Family and Community Medicine and Associate Dean and Associate Designated Institutional Official of Graduate Medical Education at EVMS. She is also a Certified Executive, Physician & Life Coach and Certified Trainer, Crucial Conversations® for Mastering Dialogue.