The infamous “new year, new me”. About this time each year we see all our friends and family posting on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or any other social media platforms telling us their greatest plan for their new year’s resolution. You might be telling everyone or just pondering the thought of a new year’s resolution in your head. It’s honestly great to have a new year’s resolutions! It’s a personal goal to help better yourself in any kind of way that you think you might need. The only issue with new year’s resolutions is many times people set unrealistic goals for themselves and end up quitting their resolution and just doing what they have done in years past. Remember that when you are making these NYR, you need to start small to work your way to the big goal and to ultimately be successful. Here are some basic resolutions, and how to make yours better.
1. Lose 30 pounds
Instead of your NYR being lose a certain amount of weight, have it be something along the lines of: deciding only to eat out once a month, working out at least four days a week, choosing fruits and veggies over potato chips. All of these will help toward your main goal of losing weight, but you won't be disappointed when you lose one pound a week instead of 12.
2. Quit drinking pop/coffee
Quitting cold turkey, ending up with withdrawls, and resorting back to your bad habit isn’t a good goal. Alternately, try having your NYR be intaking only a certain amount of mg of caffeine per day, or a few glasses of pop/coffee per day/week depending on your needs.
3. Saving more money
Rather than never doing anything fun with friends or always skipping out on buying your daily coffee, try creating a budget. This will give you an outline of how much money to spend per month -- with of course, adding a certain percentage of your budget to your save category.
4. Enjoying life more
This one is tricky. People who set this resolution may decide they are going to achieve this in many different ways since we all have different interests. Although it sounds great in words, we all cannot do something we enjoy 24/7. To improve this NYR, try doing something you like to do each day for an hour -- weather that is catching up with friends, working on a new hobby or cooking dinner for your family.
5. Travel more
If you are planning 25 trips for 2017 you probably aren’t being realistic with the time you can afford and get off of work this year. Start off with planning one big OR two small trips for the next few months and see how easy the traveling works in your schedule.