- Make a mind map.
Google’s career coach, Jenny Blake, suggests making a mind map and visualizing your resolutions as goals. You put the year in the center and then you draw bubbles for different themes/areas of your life that you consider important and wish to be successful in. For instance, family, friends, business, fitness, finances, fun, or personal development. Then, from each of those themes, you draw additional spokes with what you want to accomplish in each of those areas that signify success for you. Good questions to ask to help you develop these are “What does success look like?”, “What’s the most important part of that area of my life?”. These new spokes work like mini goals, for example, learn a new skill, manage my finances, make more friends, or spend more time with family. This way, you are looking at your goals with a broader perspective, but also setting step stones on how to achieve success in each of these areas of your life.
- Manage and track your savings.
While this resolution may not be explicitly stated on everyone’s list, in order to take that dream trip to Thailand, buy your dream car, or visit your family more often, you have to have the money to do so. Therefore, managing your finances is important to everyone. This doesn’t mean having a lot of money, but making the most out of the money you do have! To me, looking at things from a broader scope and then narrowing down is a very effective way to set my goal. So when it comes to finance, I found a chart that explained how much you had to save per day in order to retire with a million dollars at 65. If you start when you’re 20, you should save $2 a day, which adds up to $61 a month. Now, if you start at 25, you should save $3.57 a day, which totals $109 a month. Obviously, if you manage to save more than that every month, even better! And if you need some extra help on how to keep track of how much your saving, open a second checking account and deposit that money into it every day or every month. Savings accounts have very low interest rates and come with a ton of fees, so watch out for that.
3. Make a fitness goal timeline.
While not all of us were victims of the college weight gain, this seems to be embedded in many people’s new year’s resolutions. Whether you’re training for a marathon, trying to lose the freshman 15, or just want to live a healthier lifestyle, making a timeline of your fitness goal is extremely helpful. You start by setting a large goal, run 10km for example, then you set smaller goals such as, run 2km, run 5km, run 8km and so on. You decide a deadline for your large goal and make little boxes for each day leading up to it and marking your smaller goals throughout. For each of those smaller goals, assign yourself a reward. This can be a mani-pedi, a trip to your favorite restaurant, or that new workout gear you’ve been wanting. These smaller goals and simple rewards will keep you on track and motivated to keep going.