I’ve written about how to set New Year’s Resolutions but what’s the best way to make sure you actually reach the goals that you set? Penelope Trunk of Brazen Careerist offered up some tips on the subject today that I thought were useful enough to expand on, and her title was good as well so I borrowed it for this post:

How to Keep a New Year’s Resolution?

Penelope recommends two things I’ve mentioned before:

• Visualize Achieving your Goal – A New Year’s Resolution Secret
• Start Now – How to Set Awesome New Year’s Resolutions

She also suggests:

• Starting Small – Don’t ask yourself to accomplish the change all at once.  Let yourself ease into it.
• Focusing on the 1^st Three Weeks – The first few weeks are important to establishing your actions as a habit. Penelope shares research that suggests three weeks is the magic amount of time.
• Goal Wording – How you phrase your goal is important, you want to be specific so you know precisely what you need to do in order to reach it.  Penelope also recommends your New Year’s Resolution be explained to describe something you want, not a goal that’s only supposed to make other people happy. This makes sense, if it’s phrased to describe something you want then you’re more likely to take action.

New Year’s Resolution Tips

Here are a few other things you can do to help make sure you keep your New Year’s Resolution:

Make it Public

If you announce your goals to others in your life then you’ll be accountable to them for making your goals happen.  If other people know that you’re supposed to do things like:

• Start bringing your lunch to work so you can save money & build an emergency fund
• Work overtime for funds to pay off credit card debt
• Setup an IRA, 401k, or 403b to start saving for retirement
• Begin a college fund for your kids

then you’ll be more likely to take action.  If you’re the only one that knows about your goal, it’s easier for you to sluff off and say to yourself “I’ll start that next year”.

Track Your Progress

The simplest way is to keep a notebook where you write down each day what you did, or didn’t do, to reach your goal.  You could combine “Make it Public” with tracking your progress and start a blog where you declare your goals and then document your progress towards them.  If you’re not comfortable sharing with the world, there are ways you can limit access to specific people in your life. 

However you do it, be sure to track your progress. Goals that aren’t tracked are less likely to be achieved.

Okay, enough about New Year’s resolutions.  You’re probably sick of reading about them for the last few days, I won’t write about them again until next year : )

Want to know the secret to keeping your New Year’s Resolutions?  Pretend that you’ve already acheived them!

I’m not saying that if you imagine yourself as 30 pounds lighter or $5000 richer that it will automatically happen.  However, visualizing how things will be in your life once you’ve reached your goal can be the first step to making it happen.

I think I’ve already talked about it in one way or another on this site but the idea is you imagine your ideal scenario and take notes about every little detail.  Once you know what you want to acheive then you can work backwards to figure out what specific actions to take to get there.

For example, once you have your ideal image in your head, you ask yourself what would I have needed to do to make this a reality?  Once you figure that out, you ask what the preceding action would have been, what the action before that would have been, and so on.  You keep working backwards from your imagined perfect future and keep a list of the actions, until you reach your current day status.

There you have it, a list of all the actions you need to take to reach your goal.  This can be kind of tricky with more abstract goals but it works well with concrete ones, specific financial goals are a good example.  If you set a money resolution of building up a $5000 emergency fund by the end of the year, you can list out specific steps you’ll take to spend less, earn more, and save more.  If the numbers add up to $5000 over 12 months and you follow the actions you list, then you should have your money goal saved by the end of the year.

Another New Year’s Resolution tip is to work on your goals ahead of time, before the ball drops in Times Square.  A little planning ahead can help you set awesome New Year’s Resolutions!

How specific are you when you set your goals? If you were more detailed do you think you’d be more likely to reach them?

I’ve always heard that being very specifc about your goals increases your chances of achieving them. Last weekend, I saw some pretty good examples of this theory in action.

A Ten Year Plan

I met with about 40 other people for our 10 year college reunion and spent a few hours catching up and visiting about where they were in life.  During the course of the evening they were showing a video that was taped about 10 years ago, interviewing members of our class right before graduation.

One of the questions people answered on the tape was, “Where do you think you’ll be in 10 years from now”.  Some of the responses were pretty general like “I hope I’ll be making a lot of money somewhere”. Other people laid out their plans in great detail.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t on the video.  I’m not sure why I didn’t participate; perhaps I was studying hard for finals or maybe I was celebrating my pending graduation.  Whatever the reason, I know if I had that I wouldn’t have been as detailed as many of the responses that I heard.

Achieving Goals

As I visited with people after we watched the video I made a point to ask each person how close they had come to meeting their “ten year plan”.

Not surprisingly, more of the alumni with very detailed plans had reached the point in their life that they had been aiming for.   Of course not everyone’s plans had worked out.  Some people had changed course over time, others had tried unsuccessfully and had to change their plans.

Overall, the people that were specific about what they wanted their life to be like ten years down the road were more likely to have achieved those goals.  Now I need to sit down and make out my 10 year plan to get my family where we want to be when our kids are teenagers, gulp : )