New Year, New Me: Five Ideas For Realistic New Years Resolutions

Everyone knows New Year’s resolutions can be hard to keep. With goals like losing weight and staying active, people may start the year off on the right foot but start to renege on their commitment as the year goes on. Creating realistic New Year’s resolutions can prevent feelings of failure or discouragement and instead keep you motivated throughout the year.

Making New Year’s Resolutions That Matter

As people begin to form their New Year’s Resolutions, it’s important to consider why you’re  creating these goals for yourself in the first place. Questioning your overall intentions can help clarify the next steps of achieving your goal.
When creating New Year’s Resolutions, here are a few things to consider:

1. Make your goals attainable. A lot of the time, New Year’s resolutions  can be overarching and not something reasonably attained in a short period of time. Creating smaller goals that lead to your huge overarching goal makes achieving your goal 10 times easier.
2. Notice what you’re already doing well. All too often, New Year’s resolutions can become focused on changing negative aspects of an individual. It’s important to take the time to consider what is already going well in your life and what you wish to continue doing. Viewing yourself through a strength-based lens can help motivate you to build upon the many positive aspects of your life.
3. Congratulate yourself along the way with each baby step. For example, if your New Year’s Resolution is to lose weight, congratulating yourself every time you go to the gym can be helpful for your motivation. It may not seem like very much, but these baby steps are very important to reach your goal. Change will not happen overnight.
4. Set a daily intention. Parents can set a daily intention each morning that feels manageable and motivating. An example of that could be, “My intention today is to be patient and not rush through my work, so during lunch I will take a walk around the block and breathe in the fresh air.”
5. Positive Affirmations. Throughout therapeutic programming at Trails, students are encouraged to share Positive Affirmations, or PAs, about themselves and their group members. New Year’s Resolutions often revolve around becoming more motivated and positive about our lives. We want to feel like we’re doing well. In the home environment, families can incorporate PAs into daily routines, such as at family dinner time. Each member of the family can go around and say a positive affirmation about themselves and others in the family. This spreads positivity amongst the family and helps strengthen family bonds.

 
The New Year presents us with a natural reset to consider how we wish to shape our lives. Take advantage of this time, and build upon what makes you special and important. Each day is an opportunity to live the life we desire. What is your intention for today, and how will you fulfill it?

Trails Carolina can help

If your child is continuing to struggle with behavioral or emotional challenges in the new year, Trails Carolina can help. For more information about our wilderness therapy program, please call 800-975-7303.