New Years is a wonderful time to reevaluate your goals and challenge yourself to improve your life but New Year’s resolutions that are overly ambitious are often forgotten before they can be achieved. Make simple, realistic resolutions and allow yourself to make mistakes. Small steps towards your goal can help you create big changes in your life. USA.gov has a great list of popular New Year’s resolutions if you need some ideas to get started.

Keep Things Simple

Elaborate resolutions that require a complete and sudden change in lifestyle are not realistic and they can actually do more harm than good by frustrating you and setting you back further than you where at the start of the New Year. Simple resolutions that are realistic for your stage of life, schedule, and abilities are more likely to produce positive change over the long term. Change can happen step by step throughout the year and be very effective in helping to reach long term goals.

Make Specific Resolutions

General resolutions like the popular, “lose weight” are hard to follow because they don’t include specific goals for you to reach. Rather than making a generalized resolution that can be difficult or impossible to gauge progress, set a specific goal. Instead of deciding to “lose weight”, set a goal to drink 8 glasses of water a day, walk for 30 minutes every day, or lose 10 pounds by a specific date. Having a specific goal to reach for can help you determine what steps you need to take to reach your goal and have something finite to reach for.

Share your Resolutions

Being accountable to someone else for your New Year’s goals can dramatically increase your chances of success. Whether you choose to have a partner to help you meet a mutual weight loss goal or simply sharing your goals with your family so they can help keep you on track making your resolutions public makes it harder to let your New Year’s resolutions fizzle after the initial excitement has worn off. Social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter can be a great platform to share your resolutions with others and have an instant support system to help you reach your goals. Try posting your New Year’s resolutions on Facebook and asking for some tough love and see if your resolutions last a bit longer than they have when you’ve tried to go at it alone.

Make Monthly Resolutions

Yearly resolutions have an element of excitement but short term goals are often more effective and can be started at any point during the year. You’ve often heard that it takes 21 days to create a habit. A new study has determined that it probably takes closer to 66 days to create a habit. Moms are often already overwhelmed by daily tasks and responsibilities, so adding a long list of New Year’s resolutions to their plate at the beginning of the year is really not realistic. Set aside a few minutes at the beginning of each month to set a few simple goals that you want to work on that month and give yourself the chance to start over every month instead of just once a year.

Give Yourself a Break

New Year’s resolutions do not have to be abandoned because of one slip up. No one is perfect and there are going to be times when your resolve to make changes is going to be weaker than others. Allow yourself to make mistakes and then keep moving towards your goal. Even two steps forward and one step back is still making progress.

What is your New Year’s Resolution?