Don’t Make New Year Resolutions Make New Year Goals

As we say goodbye to last year and hello to the new year I’m setting the intention to change my life for the better this year.

Every year I follow the New Year tradition of making resolutions. These resolutions are usually something that revolve around what I want my life to look like for the next year, or something personal about myself that I would like to see change. Now, don’t get me wrong I don’t think there is anything wrong with this tradition. In fact, I think it’s really awesome that like most people, I enter the new year with all these dreams, goals, and ambitions that I want to see myself achieve in the new year. However, if I’m being honest, I never follow through with any of my New Year resolutions. Not a single one.

The tradition of making a New Year resolution(s) goes as followed. You make a resolution(s) on the first day of the new year, and that resolution(s) is to serve as your overall intent for the New Year. Resolutions can be anything. There is absolutely nothing specific about them except what you specifically intend to achieve in the new year. For some people their resolution may be to lose a specific amount of weight in the new year, like 30 pounds. For other people their resolution may be to finally go backpacking in Europe. Whatever your resolution(s) have been in the past years, or whatever they may be in the new year, they’re always a little hard to keep and follow through with.

Right? I can’t be the only one who never follows through with their New Year resolution(s). I’m not saying that there aren’t people who do follow through with their New Year resolution(s), because of course there are. More power to those people! However, I know that despite that there are probably more people who don’t follow through with any of their New Year resolution(s). At least not for the whole year! You may see it through for the month of January, or a couple of months throughout the year, but you’re not seeing it through the way that you intended to. There isn’t any consistency with that resolution. If this is you, please do not be ashamed, embarrassed, or feel guilty in any way, because I am one of them too.

So, as we move into the new year I’m setting the intention to not make any resolutions, but instead to make goals. These goals are going to be things that I plan to achieve this year. We all have different things that motivate us, and for me (and I honestly think for most people) something that has a consistent motivational factor are goals. What is it that you really want to achieve? What milestone in your life are you looking to finally get to? Where do you really see yourself in the next five years, and what steps specifically are you going to take in order to get there?

We can all based these things off of resolutions that we can make, if we wanted to follow in line with the New Year tradition. But why? Why follow in line with the New Year tradition and make such resolutions, when we can just make it our goals? That way, when we don’t necessarily achieve it before the year is up, we’re not beating ourselves up over it. New Year resolutions are great and they work for many people. But this year I’m doing something different. I’m going against the grain and instead of making New Year resolutions, I am going to make New Year goals, because I want to challenge myself in everything that I do this year.

To help keep myself inspired, as well as to inspire you all as we move into the new year, I have gathered five examples of success stories about people who have set goals for themselves and have actually achieved them. I personally think that one of the best forms of learning is being able to learn from others. These success stories are examples of achieving any type of goal that I think we all can look to as inspiration, and further more as proof, that literally anything is possible if we just put in the hard work required to achieving whatever that overall goal is. These individuals set the intention to achieve a specific goal. These stories reveal where seeing that goal through has gotten them.

Jeff Proctor at Breaking The One Percent shares his success story of becoming a full-time blogger, as well as what steps he took in creating his own successful business.

Article: 7 Things I’ve Learned Since Becoming a Successful Full Time blogger

“In this post, I share some things I learned about become a full-time blogger and earning over $90k in revenue from my blogging business in 2017.” – Jeff Proctor

Article: 5 Tips for Handling the Stress of Starting Your Own Business (My Personal Story)

“This is an article I wrote that originally appeared on Entrepreneur.com that highlights some of the things I have learned since starting a business, including what I did after my first major failure/setback.” – Jeff Proctor

Nicole Stirling at 366 Days of Running shares her success with achieving a 3kms run back in 2012.

Article: 366 Days of Running

“366 Days of Running was my personal challenge for 2012; I had to run 3kms (which takes me approx. 20 minutes) every day of the leap year. I wanted to better myself, to do something out of the norm of the races, and set an achievable habit that could run (pun intended!) into the years to follow. This habit eventually lead me to a new challenge: a half marathon, my first, second, third… ninth marathon, and even a 45km ultra race!” – Nicole Stirling

Doma Lama at Doma Lama shares her success story of finally creating her blog.

Article: What I Learned & Earned in Four months of Blogging

“My Biggest achievement of this year is to finally gather my courage and take the first step towards the path of my choice. The path happened to be blogging and that’s how my Blog- https://domalama.com came into existence” – Doma Lama

Torey Duvall at Lovely & Green shares her success story of making the move from Michigan to Seattle.

Article: Tips for a Move Across the Country

“My husband and I are true adventurers at heart. Living in Michigan we felt a little limited for what we aspired to do: camping, hiking, exploring mountains. We talked about moving to Seattle for 2 years from planning potential apartments to potential hobbies we would pick up.

Once the job hunting started, reality started to set in about the difficulty of a cross-country move. It seemed nearly impossible to find a job, sell our house, and find a new place to live all in a place I had never been to and he had only been to once.

We started making baby steps towards the right direction. Sold our house, got a short-term apartment lease giving us a 6-month deadline to find a job in Seattle. We applied to jobs like crazy. Then, one day it happened. My husband received the call offering him a job with start date landing 2 weeks before our lease ended.

We were successful because we took necessary preparations, took action, gave ourselves a deadline, and most of all BELIEVED in us.” – Torey Duvall

Tracy Crishom at Building The Foundation Marriage, Family, Home shares her success story of returning back to school in order to get her degree.

Article: Dreams Do Come True

“My success story is about my desire to get my degree and returning back to school after having my eleventh child.” – Tracy Crishom

And there you have it! five different examples of goals that these individuals made the intent to achieve, and have seen that intention through.

These are just some examples of goals that you can make moving into the new year. If none of the goals that you want to set the intention to achieve line up with any of these, no worries. These are simply meant to be used as motivation and further more to prove that so long as the intention, commitment, and dedication is there, you can achieve anything you put your mind to!

Whether your intent this year is to make New year goals or New Year resolutions this year, no what those goals or resolutions may be, here’s to obtaining success in the new year!

See you in the new year love bugs! I can’t wait to see all the things we will accomplish this year! Be safe, be a happy, and remember you are of importance to this world, and your voice matters.

To check out more inspiring blogs by these lovely people just click on the links below!

Breaking The One Percent

366 Days of Running

Doma Lama

Lovely & Green

Building The Foundation

Thank you to everyone who shared their success story with the Kimora Chanel (aka love bugs) fam! It means so much to me that you all took the time to do so.

Happy New Year everyone!

-Xo

Kimora