You’re Approaching the New Year All Wrong

The new year is here and everyone’s making New Year’s resolutions like their lives depend on it. The goal-setting process at this time of year is so unusual. We make these promises to ourselves and then when we don’t achieve them by the end of next year, we kick ourselves for it!

Well, if you ask me, it’s time for a change. Setting goals for the new year is great.

However, what’s not so great is looking back at the past year and thinking – thank goodness that year is finally over.

Are you guilty of saying this sentence to yourself at the end of the year? I know there have been a few years in my past where I said it myself, but I have since stopped that because I realized something so important. I realized that I was approaching the new year ALL WRONG. And, I’m willing to bet that many of you are making the same mistake I did.

So, here’s my short lesson on why you’re approaching the new year all wrong and how you should approach it instead.

Celebrate your last year!

Before you set your goals for 2020, you should really take a moment to celebrate your last year. 2019 may have been the best year of your life, or the worst year of your life. Either way, if you look hard enough, you’re sure to find some great things that happened despite all of the ‘not so great’ things that took place along the way.

Know that the calendar does not have any power over you. After all, the original purpose of the calendar was to keep track of the seasons. It’s man-made and the truth is that you can start a new year for yourself every day if you really want to.

If you’re struggling to find any reasons to smile about 2019, smile about this: you SURVIVED it. You’re here today, aren’t you? If that’s not something to smile about, then what is?

Instead of making a long list packed with unrealistic goals, write a list of all the incredible things that happened last year. This will let you see that while you might not have lost as much weight as you hoped, or paid off your debt, you did have some small successes along the way and those small successes are worth celebrating!

The right way to do New Year’s resolutions!

In Tory Johnson’s book, The Shift, she talks about how we often stop ourselves from progress by pre-determining that the progress will either be too slow or insufficient. But, if we just work on making progress little by little through the year, by the end of it, we can look back and see just how far we’ve come.

Maybe you didn’t lose 30 pounds as you hoped. But maybe you’ve lost 10 pounds or five pounds. Celebrate each pound! Maybe your business hasn’t reached six-figures as you hoped, but it’s still putting food on the table, isn’t it? Celebrate that!

The right way to do New Year’s resolutions is to ask yourself what can I do more of? How can I focus on the positives and keep focusing on the positives in 2020?

Look back at all of the positives in 2019 and forgive yourself for what you see as failures. Celebrate the things that went right in 2019 and don’t beat yourself up over things you can’t change. There’s no need to make a list this year, you can just choose one or two things that you want to improve on and celebrate each win along the way.

Embrace positive change and start thinking about what you want to do more of. Maybe you want to do more exercise, save more, get out and talk to people more and so on. 

Build positive change today, one step at a time…

You can watch the video related to this blog post and podcast episode below: