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How to Keep Your New Year’s Resolution

In 2007, Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, conducted a study to test the commitment to New Year’s resolutions. His study found that roughly 78% of all people who make New Year’s resolutions fail to keep them.

So how can you make 2012 different from the past few years? How can you keep your New Year’s resolutions for the entire year rather than just a few months, weeks or even days?

Go Public

The 2007 survey revealed that those who were successful in keeping their New Year’s resolutions found encouragement by going public with their goals. Fortunately, you have a plethora of platforms on which to be vocal about your resolutions.

Facebook, Tweet or blog about your resolutions as well as each time you hit a milestone or are feeling overwhelmed by what you have to accomplish. The positive reinforcement from friends and family will help to push you in keeping your commitment.

If you don’t want to tell the whole world, just tell a friend. Who knows? Maybe you’ll even find someone in your circle of friends who has the same resolution. You can work to keep each other accountable as the year goes on.

Keep a Journal

Buy a journal that is exclusively for keeping track of your New Year’s resolutions. Here, you can jot down how many days each week that you work out, which books you want to read before the end of the year or the location and details of all of your volunteer gigs.

Besides cataloguing the basics in your journal, write out your honest thoughts and feelings on how your resolutions are going. You’ll find that when you look back at those journal entries, you’ll be able to see how far you’ve come or boost your motivation when you see how excited you were to conquer your resolutions in the first few weeks.

Set Small Goals

Your New Year’s resolution may be losing weight or getting better grades, and while those are awesome goals, people sometimes find it more difficult to commit to something so general.

Set smaller goals within your large, reaching goal. For instance, aim for losing a pound a week. Or try to score better on each test or essay than you did the last week.

You’ll find more success and greater motivation when you accomplish these small goals versus having to wait until the end of the year to measure your success.

How do you plan to keep your New Year’s resolutions this year?

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