If you are the kind of goal-setting person who feels that making a New Year’s resolution is not only easy for you, but is just one more goal that you are fitting into your daily schedule, then you are sticking to resolving a problem. The commonality between the resolutions is that they are usually the things in someone’s life that they have been unable to change over the years, such as losing weight, being on time or exercising regularly. There is a difference between the people who succeed and those who quit earlier than they had planned. It depends on who takes the resolution seriously and who has not thought about such a time-honored tradition as a personal test.
An impulsive decision made at midnight, which is officially the first of the year, can only be viewed as a lark, not a serious proposition. Consider this: It must be thought of as a daily deadline.
Choosing something that you will never do every day or that you have tried most years, such as working out or eating healthier foods on a regular basis, will only make the task impossible to complete. Making a resolution at midnight as a part of a celebration on New Year’s Eve does not ensure you have made the right choice. According to researchers and experts in the social sciences, a smaller segment of those among us has a better chance of being successful at such tasks. It is a well-known fact that people with the tenaciousness and determination to finish what they have started are most successful when they choose something important to them. Skills such as organization and time management help a lot. The ability to make a resolution that sticks comes naturally for someone who plans how they use time each day.
To complete even one of the lifelong “to-do” tasks that are flung out into the world at the end of each year, one must be committed to change. Now that a week has gone by, most of the folks who made a resolution toward changing their behavior have already fallen off the goal-setting cliff. Their plan has fallen apart, and they might have already stopped feeling guilty about their own lack of willpower for following through with only one personal goal. The especially disheartened folks are usually the set of people who practically fail before they have started. They only initiate it, continuing the fun celebration that their family may have modeled for them. The most likely way they share a celebration to welcome in the New Year is by watching the televised “ball drop” in Times Square in New York City to welcome in the New Year. The best resolution to make in 2026 might be to travel to New York City for that experience. We all might be best to just have a good time considering the kind of resolutions we will make. I resolve to not make any resolutions in the next year — works for me!
By DOLLY VISCARDI