How to Not Screw Up Your New Year's Resolutions

"Tip 1: Let Process Fire Your Resolutions

Process is the ever-changing relationship you have with your goals, and it is meant to be fluid and imperfect. Instead of stressing that you're hitting your outcomes at each turn, ask yourself: Am I regularly having contact and a relationship with my goals and dreams?

Instead of getting critical about what gets in the way, process makes you see it from a growth mindset: What else can I learn about myself by engaging this more compassionately and with more curiosity? Coming from a place of unconditional curiosity, joy, and love rather than a place of obligation, fear, or judgment, process is a more faithful Muse sure to keep you fired up about your resolutions throughout the year.

Tip 2: Shrink Your Year for Better Results

Focusing on a year is too big and ambitious and the psyche tends to give up or shut down too easily. A better tack is to divvy up your year into smaller segments. By scaling down your resolution to three months, you tend to feel much less pressure and angst.

Within that more doable and comfortable container, you'll make a big specific goal that is worked out through smaller mini-goals to get you there day to day and week to week. Because your goals are closer to the here-and-now scale, you tend to more naturally engage what we've done above, keeping process as the engine of your resolutions.

Tip 3: Find the Right Accountability Partners

We also tend to accelerate helping ourselves by focusing on helping others. Accountability partners are often much more compassionate than that impersonal and savage critic in your own head. They help you find new approaches that enable you to become a more efficient and kindhearted troubleshooter.

It's important to find accountability partners who have a both-and orientation to process and outcome. Of course, we always want to be moving closer and closer to our goals, but we also want to have someone who is just as intrigued and interested and rolling with the adjustments necessary to make things hum. In short, our accountability partners become our improv scene partners, helping us to follow our own direction, and find new ways to make interesting moments out of the fun."

Read the complete article available at Psychology Today!

Reflection:

What are some of your resolutions for the next year?

#NewYear #Resolutions #Motivation