7 tricks to achieve your New Year's resolutions
A new year is coming and, with it, something inevitable: the illusion of a new beginning, the desire to undertake projects that make us improve as people and break with the problems of the past, the desire to leave behind habits that we do not like...
In short, the New Year's resolutions arrive.
What New Year's resolutions are you going to make for yourself?
To what extent these exciting ideas are more fanciful or more realistic depends to a greater extent on us, our abilities and the desire we put into them. However, there is another factor to consider: the ability to use what we know about the human mind to make our new goals easier to achieve.
Or what is the same, the option of knowing and applying certain psychological tricks to face the challenges that will come in the best conditions.
Here you have 7 keys that will help you to be a little closer to that "me" of the future who you want to become.
1. Specify your goals
It is common to create New Years resolutions too abstract or ambiguous to be chased. For example, wishes like "I want to be freer" or "I'm going to learn more" tend to come to nothing precisely because we don't even know what specific goals we should reach. What does it mean to be free? What do we want to learn?
That is why it is important that, from the beginning, let's have clear rather concrete goals. This, on the one hand, will make us have consistent objectives over time (which will allow us to get closer to them and not to others. "distractions") and, on the other hand, it will make it possible to assess in the most objective way possible whether we have fulfilled our New Year's resolutions or not.
2. Create intervals
In the previous point we have talked about the importance of detailing as much as possible the objectives or sub-objectives we want to reach. However, once this is done, we can transform these specific goals into intervals with a maximum and a minimum value that mark what we consider acceptable. For example, If we want to lose weight, it is better to set the sub-goal of losing between 1.2 kg, and 0.8 kg every two weeks to set a goal of losing 1 kg. biweekly.
This is because there is evidence that if we set goals in intervals, we perceive them as something more achievable and more motivating.
3. Plan short-term goals
This step actually serves to not always leave for tomorrow the tasks that, to achieve your New Year's resolutions, you must start today. That will be an almost irresistible temptation if you do not set intermediate goals (between your current situation and the end of the year that begins) at very specific times on the calendar, but if you divide your personal development plans in several pieces and you are making these are distributed in small daily or weekly goals, you will have it much easier to meet your objectives.
For that, nothing like making well-established schedules and setting short deadlines to reach your small personal goals.
4. Use a physical calendar
Having a physical calendar and putting it in a place that you see very often is important because... It is more important to run away from him! If your calendar is digital, you can probably only see it if you want, by clicking on certain buttons. However, a paper calendar with gaudy colored notations and dates is harder to ignore. Even if you want to.
5. Start now with your new year's plan
Several studies suggest that the night of the end of the year and the first days of January are a unique date to start seriously with your projects. The reason is that in this small period of time, and not in another, people tend to consider that we have changed because of having gone through that temporary border that it is New Years Eve and therefore we think that it is easier to "unlearn old habits and adopt new ones while we are in those days.
It is something like a window of opportunity that opens in our calendar and that could make us less likely to resist change. Possibly this also occurs on a larger time scale: according to research, people with an age whose last digit ends in 9 (29, 39, etc.) have a greater desire to undertake new projects and give new meaning to their lives.
Knowing this is important, because even if it is somewhat irrational and unconscious, we can take advantage of it in a very rational way. The method is simple: if we are predisposed to stop thinking about ourselves as people chained to their habits, it is better to start adopting new habits right at that moment and not at other. This will make the transition to this new way of behaving more comfortable and more likely to be successful.
6. Take advantage of group pressure
It has long been known in the field of psychology that group pressure is capable of raising our ability to exert ourselves in a very significant way. For example, psychological therapy programs for smoking cessation are usually more successful if they are carried out in group sessions, and the performance of athletes also improve when they exert themselves alongside other people who do the same, even if theoretically they are not competing with each other Yes.
That is why it is a good idea to share your New Year's resolutions with other people and for them to do the same in turn, to share the aspirations of each one. This will create a kind of contract around these promises that will be harder to break and will push us away from the tempting possibility of throwing in the towel.
7. Make an assessment of the year that has passed
This part may seem less exciting and exciting than the task of setting goals and envisioning the future to come, but it is also very necessary. Why? Because lets us make sense of the idea of setting new year's goals, or what is the same, make that at the moment when a new period of our lives begins we see as something interesting the option of setting ourselves new goals again, being used to taking this as a serious and important.
Also, of course, this will allow us to see our progress in certain areas of Personal development, which is very motivating and will make us want to face the challenges that are to come.
