How To Achieve Your New Year’s Resolutions

It’s that time of year when we kid ourselves that we can become better people by making New Year’s resolutions.

Actually, we CAN become better people, but only making resolutions that are set up to succeed from the outset. No, I’m not talking about aiming low (the biggest risk of setting ourselves low expectations is that we’ll achieve them), but rather having a structure in place that’ll support us as we work towards whatever it is we’re trying to achieve.

There was a piece in the Guardian about this earlier in the week. Apparently, most resolutions are doomed to failure, but according to research by Richard Wiseman , you can stack the odds back in your favour with five simple support mechanisms:

1. Break your goal into smaller steps. for fitness-related goals, this is why I’m a big fan of periodised training plans - three weeks of progressively harder work, before a rest week to recover.
2. Reward yourself when you achieve each of the small steps. I can see my alcohol restrictions being lifted a little in those rest weeks!
3. Tell your friends about your goals. Have I mentioned that I’ve signed up for Ironman Nice this year? Actually, one of the cool, built-in features of Sweat365.com blogs is that it’s really easy to setup goal-countdown widgets to display what you’ve signed-up for, and how long you’ve got left ’till D-Day. There’s one up there for Nice, showing that I have just 176 days to go. Gulp!
4. Focus on the benefits of success. Competing in progressively tougher races has got me back to the same size jeans I wore when I was half my current age, and made me mentally hard as nails. Problems no-longer phase me, and I’m hoping that Ironman will be much more of the same!
5. Keep a diary of your progress. This could be a pen and paper diary (are you an Adrian Mole or Samuel Pepys?), though more realistically a blog. Again - one of those cool features of sweat365.com to help with this is all those workout tracking things, graphs, data, and general stuff that helps you keep thinking about your progress and keep sharing it with your friends, who can comment and keep you encouraged to succeed.

So what are your New Year’s Resolutions, and how are you going to stack the odds in favour of success this year?

Filed under: France, Friends, Goals, IronMan?, Triathlon