Why New Year’s Resolutions Won’t Make You a Success

I’ve written about new year’s resolutions on my blog for years. I enjoy writing about setting goals and ways to reach your new year’s resolutions more than I should.

It’s also what my readers (that’s you!) want to read. My blog traffic increases around this time of year with greater interest in my blog posts about new year’s resolutions.

After January 15? Not so much.

In theory, blog posts and articles and any content related to helping you reach your new year’s resolution should be relevant to you throughout the year.

But it’s not. In fact, some of my new year’s resolution posts aren’t visited month after month after month.

Does this surprise you? Not to me.

As much as I love creating goals and following through, I can tell you why new year’s resolutions are designed to fail. And sometimes it’s not because of your lack of strategy or execution to get the job done.

Often, it’s the mindset. In other words, it’s how we perceive new year’s resolutions that holds us back.

So, Why Won’t New Year’s Resolutions Make You a Success?

By definition, new year’s resolutions are goals you set on January 1 with the goal of achieving by (if not before) December 31.

Yet it’s the name that stunts our success. New year’s resolutions are usually thought about around New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.

This, of course, doesn’t apply to everyone. There are a select few who have a solid game plan to revisit their goal on a weekly basis and refresh their strategy every month.

For the rest of us, we don’t think about anything related to the new year in the spring or summer or fall. It’s when December 26 rolls around that we remember that we created a new year’s resolution in the first place.

That’s where we go wrong. We name our goal around a period of two days: New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. We need to think of it as This Year’s Goal.

Because a span of 365 days is a lot longer than two.

Then again, thinking of our new year’s resolution as a goal to achieve within a year is often too short of a time. In fact, it restricts the chances for your goal to succeed.

We shouldn’t treat our goal like a diet. Many of our new year’s resolutions are created as short-term fixes to a problem that’s been bugging us.

What our goal should be is a promise to change our lifestyle.

A lifestyle isn’t set to the boundaries of January through December. It’s a commitment that spans over time, from season to season. And when we think of our new year’s resolution this way, we become more committed to the goal rather than the sensationalism around it.

So it’s not that new year’s resolution won’t make you a success. It’s how you think of it, remember it and then forget about it.

It’s time to remember your This Year’s Goal.

What do you think? Are new year’s resolutions designed to make you a success? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.