How to make a New Years resolution that youll keep

How to make a New Years resolution that youll keep The way to keep a New Years resolution is to pick a good goal and then overhaul your life to in order to meet it. Duh. But some of you are saying, hold it, my goal isnt big enough to require an overhaul of my life. Maybe your goal is to, say, clean out your closet. But look, this is not material for a New Years resolution. This requires you to cross a day out on your calendar and tell yourself thats your closet day. Done. Do you know why most people dont keep their New Years resolutions? Because the resolutions are terrible. The hardest part of a New Years resolution is choosing one, not keeping it. Most resolutions are goals to change our behavior: Stop smoking, stop eating crap, stop being late. This is not a small change. This is a change that requires a massive overhaul of our daily life hour by hour. Most of you are saying that you cant afford to overhaul your whole life to meet your goal. You have a job, you have kids, you have friends who would think you have lost your mind. But you know what? If the goals you set are not worth overhauling your life for, then ask yourself why not? Pick only one We can each meet one or two big goals a year. We cant change a lot of bad behavior the more resolutions we make the less likely we are to keep them, according to Roy Baumeister, psychologist at Florida State University. But we can change one. Pick the one thatll mean the most to you. And, you will be pleasantly surprised to find out that changing one habit actually requires so many small changes in your day that you also end up being able to change other habits, because the patterns of your life change. A goal is creative, not analytic I think a lot of the time we dont let ourselves see what we really want. Maybe because it seems too hard to get. Often we dont let ourselves really see ourselves living the life we want, and I think this is a failure of imagination. To that end, I love this art exhibit (not safe at work) by Alison Jackson because it is a bunch of photos of scenes I wanted to see but didnt even realize I wanted to see until I saw them. Then I thought, oh, that is so fun to see. It made me realize how much work it is to be really conscious what I would really want. It takes a great imagination. A worthy goal means you can imagine life after meeting the goal Jim Fannin makes a living teaching people how to imagine themselves doing behavior they want. (My interview with him is one of my favorite lessons in goal setting, ever.) Fannin says its nearly impossible to meet a goal if you do not know what youd look like meeting it. He takes this to the extreme and has his clients (many major league baseball players) play movies of themselves in their heads movies of them meeting their goals. Its a good test for you. If you cant imagine in your head the moment when your meet your goal, then its probably not a good goal. If you cant meet the goal, consider that its not you, its the goal I spend a lot of times trying things out to help me find my core goals. I am a big fan of writing things down to understand oneself. After all, thats probably why I am a blogger. Sometimes I write lists of things that bug me, and I learn from that. And one year I discovered that writing letters to odd people in my life revealed a core goal. Even when I have my goal that Im focused on, I check in with myself frequently to reaffirm that its the behavior in my life that is most important to me to change like renewing ones vows. So think very hard before you make a New Years resolution. Because setting your goal is much harder than meeting it.