Picture this: it’s New Year’s Eve. Regardless of how you feel about this particular holiday (and we know it’s a controversial one), with the new year upon you, you are suddenly feeling a little spark of excitement and optimism. Whether you’re ringing in 2019 on the couch with takeout and your family or at a big party in a fabulous outfit, you’re looking ahead and feeling ready to tackle this next chapter.
By this point, you may already have done some thinking about your New Year’s resolutions, or maybe you wait to consider it until after the clock strikes midnight. Either way, questions of your resolutions are going to come up eventually, and we want you to have those conversations — even if they’re just internal monologues! — confidently and happily.
We’re all for resolutions when they’re made from a place of positivity and self-esteem, rather than a place of guilt and competition. Your resolutions should make you glow. Here are five tips that we think will help you set those kinds of goals. Happy New Year, OBB fam!
1. Don’t let your friends and family’s resolutions influence you. While it’s all well and good to get psyched with loved ones about the year ahead, we urge you to be careful about falling victim to New Year’s resolution-specific peer pressure. The whole point of goal-setting before the start of the new year is to set yourself up for a positive, productive, exciting 12 months ahead, and if you start to measure your own would-be resolutions against the standards that other people are setting for themselves, you’re bound to question if what you’re setting out to do is cool or fun or ambitious. Make your resolutions all your own. You do you!
2. Take a social media hiatus. Opinions from friends and family can change how you’re feeling about your resolutions, and social media isn’t much better. Spending an excessive amount of time scrolling through Instagram and Facebook in the final days of the year will only scramble your resolution ideas, because you’ll see influencers — and let’s be honest, plenty of people you barely even know — sharing their own lofty ambitions. We hope you already know this, but most of us don’t share the full picture of our lives on our social platforms, and no one is going to be totally honest about their resolutions in a flashy post to their feed. They’re only going to highlight the good! Step away from social media so you’re not influenced by the skewed language other people are using around resolution-setting.
3. Picture how you want to feel, not what you want to do. Feeling stumped about what resolutions you want to set? Picture yourself one year from today, and rather than trying to imagine what specific items you will have accomplished by then, imagine how you want to feel at that moment. How do you want to approach each day? How do you want your emotional state to dictate your lifestyle? How do you want to make other people feel? Once you’ve answered those questions, you can work backward and figure out what specific steps you can take to get to those feelings.
4. Choose a word instead of specific resolutions. Not everyone digs the idea of New Year’s resolutions. After all, if you’re setting out to accomplish highly specific items within the span of 12 months, you’re kind of putting yourself in a position to fail if circumstances change or other, more exciting opportunities come up and knock those resolutions out of the running. Instead, choose a word you want to use to define the year ahead. Taking this approach with new year’s resolutions allows you to adapt as your life zigs and zags.
5. Write it down. You’re going to feel great if you accomplish your goals for the year, and there’s a much higher possibility of you doing so if you hold yourself accountable. Write down your resolutions (or your word of the year, if you’ve decided to give that a try) and put them somewhere where they’ll be hard for you to ignore as you go about your regular routine — on your bathroom mirror, in your planner, or on your refrigerator. You’re a lot more likely to make those resolutions happen when you’ve written them down!
Are you making resolutions for 2019? What are they? Tell us on Facebook + Twitter!
Featured image: Jamie Street/Unsplash