My take on New Years Rez-uh-loo-shuh-n-s

New Years Day serves as an important waypoint for each of us as we go through our lives; it is a time to reflect on the year gone-by and establish goals for the year ahead. What I’ve found in my own experience is that I have the tendency to become fixated on the comparative voids in my life as well as the habits or situations that I would like to change. Maybe you’ve experienced this feeling too.

To combat these feelings of lacking I say we make a resolution to make better resolutions that improves our well-being, and purposefully choose those with positive meanings to them. What exactly I mean by that I’ll get to in a moment; first lets examine the meaning of the word as defined by dictionary.com

res·o·lu·tion 

[rez-uh-loo-shuh-n]

noun

+ a resolve or determination: to make a firm resolution to do something.

+ the act of resolving or determining upon an action or course of action, method, procedure, etc.
+ the mental state or quality of being resolved or resolute; firmness of purpose.

One thing you should note in these definitions is the absence of any subtractive meaning in the word; in other words resolutions are not meant to be associated with something you are taking away from your life.   Around this time of year I often I hear people say, “I’m going to give up chocolate”, or make promises to quit smoking or simply lose weight.  While these are all great goals to have, there are a few things that they lack that I feel doom each one to failure by March.

So what is it they are missing? Namely, an additive quality, a positive reward, specificity and a method for accomplishment. Here’s what I mean:

·      Additive Quality – resolutions that add something to your life, such as “go running every week” are far more likely to result in accomplishment rather than those that take away something from your life such as “lose weight” because they are associated with something we are gaining instead of something we are giving up.
·      Positive reward – similar to the reasons for having an additive quality, goals should have some sort of a positive benefit to them. It doesn’t have to be grandiose at all; building on the previous example you could say “feel better by running every week.”
·      Specificity – be specific! Taking a flight of stairs very quickly once a week could be considered completing the aforementioned resolution if we didn’t set an expectation or measurement for ourselves. “Feel better by running nine miles each week” is a good start.
·      Methods for accomplishment – specificity serves to answer the question “what is the goal?” A method for accomplishment answers the question “how are you going to do it?” This part is crucial to viability of the resolution because it lays out the framework or direction for how to tackle it. For example, “Feel better by going for a three mile run at 6 AM on Monday, Wednesday and Friday of each week.”

Also, you can try using the S.M.A.R.T. method for establishing resolutions or goals in your life. S.M.A.R.T. stands for:
·      Specific
·      Measurable
·      Attainable
·      Realistic
·      Timely

(Yes, we business people love our corny acronyms.)
To use the system simply make sure that every goal that you set for yourself meets each one of the criteria in the acronym. This framework serves as a great way to set any goal you may have, whether it be for school, work or your personal life (For more on S.M.A.R.T., check out topachievement.com/smart.html)

Perhaps I’m over thinking this popular New Years tradition - and yes you can call me a dork for being soooo technical - but if your serious about making this year better than the last and improving your life, I feel these steps will help you to do so.

Cheers and Happy New Year!

[Special thanks to my good friend Meagan Hecht for sparking the conversation that drove the creation of this blog post.]