Everybody would like to keep their resolutions, but few do. How can you make challenging, yet reachable and quantifiable resolutions for the year? Suppose you resolve to be more charitable to others. How could you employ the fundamental elements of effective goal setting so that you actually begin to see the results of your resolution?

1. Challenging but reachable – To be charitable to others, especially if you’re not, is challenging in and of itself. To be more challenging assumes that you already exhibit some level of charitability; hence, it’s likely that this resolution is reachable.

2. Quantifiable – How might you quantify this resolution?

* You could target an amount of money you would give to charitable organizations or homeless people on the street, if that’s what you choose, within a given year, quarter, or month. Hence, you could measure your charity by the amount of donations you made.

* You could chart the number of times you said something nice to other people, went out of your way to help them, or otherwise displayed some act of kindness. Perhaps your goal is to do this once a day. If you’re ambitious, perhaps it’s three times a day. The act of logging how many times you’re charitable to others is as good a measure as any if you intend to live up to your resolution.

* You could log the number of hours you spend serving in charitable organizations or actually dispensing soup at soup kitchens. Perhaps you can set for yourself a quota of one hour per week working in charitable organizations, making five phone calls per week day evening on behalf of some worthwhile group, or devoting one weekend a month to some group’s planned activity.

3. Time frame – Even a resolution as nebulous as being more charitable to others can have a time frame attached to it, such as six times per week for the next twelve month.

It’s important to get out and actually taking action in a couple of key areas that are important to you, rather than uselessly sitting in your comfortable chair with your channel changer and intellectually resonating all the problems. Not only are you not going to help anyone, the longer you sit there, the bigger and flatter your bottom gets. Is that one of your resolutions? Taking action is invigorating!

A Partial List of Groups that Need Volunteers

Active Corps of Executives Kiwanis Association American Cancer Society American Heart Association American Legion Boys Club PTA Catholic Youth Organization Easter Seal Campaign Salvation Army Goodwill Industries Historical Society Urban League

Jaycees League of Women Voters Lions March of Dimes Masons Optimist Club Public Television Civitans Explorers Scouts of America Heart Fund United Way YMCA, YWCA

All About Failure

If you want to gauge whether or not making New Year’s resolutions proves to be an effective gesture for you, try this: The next time New Years rolls around, make some resolutions, write them down on a piece of paper, and file it. Don’t look at it for several months, or better yet, a whole year.

When the end of the year rolls around, take out your file, look at your piece of paper with your resolutions, and see for yourself. You’ve probably made little progress on any of them. If you have made progress, buy accutane nz you’re among the rare few.

Even if the items you listed represent burning issues for you, it’s still unlikely that you made any significant progress. Why? Today, in this society, everyone is bombarded on all sides by more things competing for their time and attention than they can keep up with. And, too many of us tolerate too many interruptions throughout the course of our days.

It Could Happen to You

Anyone can be so easily and quickly diverted these days, that it’s possible to come into work, and by ten in the morning, have no active connection with what you’ve identified as being important in your life.

Even if you are among the lucky few who make some significant progress on some of your resolutions, you probably could have achieved them in multiples had you turned them into formal goals. Without using specific goal-setting procedures any success that you achieve satisfies your resolution conditions.

Suppose you say that you’d like to lose more weight. If you lose half a pound, that satisfies the condition. Would this amount of weight loss be significant over a year?

Suppose you resolve to spend more time with your children. On 44 out of 52 weekends last year, you had no time for your children. This year, miraculously, you were tied up or away on only 43 weekends. You’re back for one weekend more than the year before. That satisfies the condition, but are your children happy about it?

Qualifying but Unsatisfying

Consider another resolution. You want to be more charitable to others. Suppose during the last year you were one mean son-of-a-gun, fly-off-the-handle, cussing, rogue of a person. In the coming year, you manage to smile at people a couple of times every couple of months. You also buy five dollars worth of Girl Scout cookies.

Does that qualify as being more charitable than you were the year before? In the strict sense, it does. Yet, would anyone deign for a moment to say that you’re a charitable person?

Since You Insist

Okay, you’re among those who annually makes New Year’s resolutions, or you’d like to try it based on what you’ve read. Here are some guidelines for making your next set of New Year’s resolutions more rewarding than those you’ve made thus far.

Only make a handful. If you have too many resolutions, as if you have too many goals, you may end up dissipating your energy and slowing your progress. When you can identify the few key things you’d like to accomplish or experience, your progress in that direction, with all other things being equal, is usually more significant.

Try choosing a theme for each year. One year focus on getting better at using computers, and another year focus on learning more about nutrition. You could even direct your efforts toward watching many of the movie classics on video. In this regard, you’re using the year, itself, as her time line.

Keep in mind that if you approach each resolution with a balanced perspective, maintain relative simplicity as often as possible, and recognize that progressing a step at a time can result in spectacular achievement, you’ll probably do well.