How to Finally Achieve Your New Years Resolutions

How many of the New Years resolutions you’re setting today, have been on your list year after year? I know the feeling... New Years just meant failure as I would have to face the fact that – yet again – I had not accomplished the New Years Resolutions I’d set last year. I knew I’d then have to turn around and muster up the courage to set some resolutions for the coming year, yet having no confidence in my ability to accomplish them.What a torturous cycle! Familiar story?

The fact is, the vast majority of people (reportedly 80%) never achieve their New Years Resolutions, and it’s pretty much expected that our resolutions will be overwhelmingly forgotten by mid-February. But one of the beautiful facts of life is that just because something has been a certain way doesn’t mean it has to continue in the same manner. I finally worked out that if I kept doing the same things, I’d keep getting the same results. But if I made some distinct changes, I could also expect a distinctly different result.

So what distinct changes can we choose to make – today – which will put an end to the cycle of New Years Resolution failures, and instead empower us to walk out all that is in our hearts to do?

1. Ditch the Name

A resolution by any other name would be… a decision! A resolution is simply a firm decision to do something. The problem is, we attach the words ‘New Years’ to it, and it paints the picture – consciously or subconsciously – that we’ll start out the New Year doing it… but not necessarily go beyond that. In fact, we’ve linked the word ‘resolution’ so strongly to ‘New Years’ that it in fact carries a different meaning – one generally associated with failure and disappointment with ourselves. There’s no reference in that thinking to a decision which carries us through the entire year, or for the rest of our lives.

Change what you call it and your mindset will change. As he thinks so is he. You don’t want to change just the start of your year – you want to change your life. Therefore, you are making empowering decisions – you are making life choices. To start something… to stop something… to build something… to create something… Life-changing decisions that are not just for a limited timeframe, but as a foundation for your life. Do let’s ditch the terminology of ‘My New Years resolution is to…’, and instead simply say, ‘I choose to…’

2. Make Sure They’re His Resolutions – Not Yours

The quickest way to get off track is to make life choices WE’VE decided on, without asking God what He wants us to do in us the coming year. If we know they’re our idea, we might feel mildly confident that we can achieve them, but if we know they’re HIS idea, we can have confidence in His strength and wisdom to show us what to do and how to do it. Much of the fear we experience when moving forward disappears when we know that we’re on track, in the middle of His will, with the knowledge of His strength. We can also have the assurance that we’re not wasting our time trying to accomplish something there is neither grace for or need to accomplish.

3. Make a Heart Change

If you’ve set the same resolutions year after year and have still never achieved them, there is more than likely something in your heart beliefs that are blocking you from following through on what you are wanting to do. Often, these are to do with your beliefs around your worth, identity, who you understand God to be, and so on - especially so if we have any life foundation that comes out of religion. When beliefs in our heart (such as it's wrong to have money) conflict with what we are trying to accomplish (such as building a business), they will always limit us. Get rid of the limiting heart beliefs and you get rid of the limitations which are holding you back.

4. Focus on the Three and the One

I had spent most of my life overwhelming myself with more goals than it was possible to accomplish – therefore I was continually nurturing an ongoing sense of failure when in fact, I was actually very capable. I was just trying to do too much at once and I had divided my focus and was therefore I was making some progress but not getting to the finish line of many things.

I have come to realise this: The most we can generally handle are three large dreams or major life choices within a one year period. I know, I know, that thought was insulting to me once upon a time! But as I am honest with myself and walking this way of living out, I can see that it’s far more effective. So seek the Lord to choose your three, and then focus on them ONE at a time, beginning with the most important one. It may seem like it will take longer this way, but it’s actually the quickest way to achievement. And if you amaze yourself and achieve your three early, you can always add another goal later...

5. Get on the Journey

For some people, goals can actually create pressure and distress. As I suggested in my previous blog (How to Finish Your Year Strongly), changing your focus from ‘Completed’ to ‘On the journey’ makes a huge difference, because if you are on the journey, you’re on the way. Once you’ve started a journey, the habits you set will carry you through to its inevitable completion, if you don’t give up (for example, writing each day if you want to be an author, or exercising each day if you want to get fit).

One of the most powerful ways to get on the journey to the completion of what it is in your heart, is to join Living Treasure Journeying – online monthly equipping to empower you to fulfil your purpose, and to enrich your life. It is a monthly pathway to moving forward, alongside a community of people who’ve decided they’re going to actually do what God has put in their hearts to do. Remember, if you do something differently, you can expect a different result. So start a journey today that will help you to finish every other one you're on.

6. Finish It

Sometimes we forget who lives inside of us. The ‘It is Finished’ spirit of Christ lives inside of you and me, therefore there’s nothing we can’t complete once we’ve started it… as long as we think with His ‘It is finished’ mindset.

When you’ve made a start and it hasn’t been as good as you would have liked, don’t do what everybody else does and think ‘I might as well give up’. You are called to travel your journey in the opposite way to the world, so don’t follow their lead. Just because you eat a piece of chocolate cake and feel like you’ve failed on your eating plan, doesn’t mean you need to have the second piece and throw the whole goal away, which is how most people function. Forgive yourself for getting off track, ask the Lord to show you how you came to do that, make the heart changes you need to, and move forward.

We also tend to forget that God has given us an amazing strategy for finishing what we start, and that is journeying with others, instead of doing it alone. Holding each other accountable to a journey and inspiring each other with our forward progress is a huge key to finishing and not giving up.

So as you begin this New Year, be confident that you can make life choices which will mean that by the time next year comes around, you’re celebrating rather than cringing.

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Today, you get to choose how you're going to feel a year from now. Will you make a life decision or a New Year's Resolution? Will you pursue God's goals or your own? Will you make a heart change or keep being bound to the same limitations? Will you focus or will you waste your energy by applying it to too many things? And most of all, will you get on the journey... or will you sit by and watch your year go by like before?

To join a journey which will help you to both start and finish your year strongly, go to Living Treasure Journeying. Be blessed as you journey with Him, into the wide-open, spacious life you were created for.