How are your New Year’s resolutions going?
If you are like most people (including me), sticking to a resolution is tough.
According to research conducted by Strava, the activity tracking app company, most people give up on their resolutions by January 19, or what Strava calls, “Quitters Day.”
I was recently asked in an interview, “Is it better to set an intention or make a resolution in the New Year?”
This one is easy to answer.
Of the two, setting an intention is preferable to making a resolution.
Here’s why.
Intentionality is akin to mindset – it prepares us to act and then keeps us moving.
In the words of Mark Petit, “When you are intentional, you choose to make decisions and take action on what’s important to you.”
The word intention comes from the Latin term, intendere, which means to “to turn one’s attention to”…to “stretch out.” It also connotes ideas of “emotion, feelings; heart, mind, and understanding.”
This is powerful stuff.
An intention involves yearning for something with our heart, mind, and might I say, soul.
Being intentional about our personal development involves developing a daily practice of checking in with yourself, your progress, assessing any roadblocks you are facing, and continuing to move in the direction of your goal.
As the adage goes, “Where intention goes, energy flows.”
Resolutions, on the other hand, are generally just vague wishes that have little ability to keep us going.
If you’re finding it hard to follow through on the promises you made to yourself on January 1, I invite you to keep reading.
Below are three things you can do to harness the power of intention, and, in the process, transform your life. Please keep in mind that the principles I discuss apply equally to all new beginnings, regardless of when we start.
Choose Meaningful Goals and Visualize Success
For intention-setting to work, we must first articulate clear, realistic goals, that are personally meaningful, and then describe exactly what success looks like.
Clear goals are key for an intention to turn into action. Write down your goals and the actions needed to achieve them. The simple act of writing down your goals brings them alive, making them real in our minds which leads to ownership.
As my colleague, friend, mentor, and all-around badass goal-setting guru, Leo McKnight, is fond of saying, “You can’t just think it…you’ve got to ink it.”
This necessarily involves visualizing what your future state looks like. I describe, in detail the visualization process here.
In a nutshell, it involves envisioning yourself achieving your goal. To do this, create a detailed mental image of the desired outcome using all your senses. I call this, outcome visualization – it gives us direction and keeps us motivated and moving.
The second type of visualization is process visualization. It involves envisioning each of the actions necessary to achieve the outcome you want. Focus on completing each of the steps you need to achieve your goal, but not on the overall goal itself. More on this below.
Thousands of people across the globe have used this process to create meaningful, sustainable change. I encourage you to read, reflect, and use these visualization principles. Feel free to tweak them to fit your particular goal and personality.
Create a Workable Plan
After you’ve visualized success and set a realistic goal, create a workable plan, with a timeline.
For instance, say you want to live healthier in 2022. To do so, you would like to lose 10 pounds. Your friends tell you to run but you’ve never run before. Running is not realistic for you.
Instead, plan to walk a specific number of steps (if you have a watch that tracks such things) or distance per week. This is much more realistic. This also might involve taking the stairs at work rather than the elevator. Whichever you choose, determine how many steps you need to get in per week to achieve your movement goal.
Notice, I’m not suggesting that you focus on your ultimate goal of losing weight but rather the process you need to achieve your goal. You can weigh yourself at intervals, but remember that your goal is improved health through weight loss and this is achieved through daily movement. Doing so (while also eating healthy) will help you shed pounds.
I call this your action goal – an intermediate achievement (e.g., daily steps) that will help you achieve your target goal (weight loss, and, ultimately, a healthy lifestyle).
We only achieve our goals when we have realistic, workable plans with a clear timeline and measurable action goals along the way.
Invite Others to Join Your Journey
Before beginning your quest, assemble a small team, or even just one person, to join you on your journey and hold you accountable.
Achieving meaningful goals is difficult. Having a partner or team alongside you will help you keep going when your motivation wanes, the going gets tough, or you experience a setback, which is inevitable.
Setting an intention is essential. Equally important is articulating a clear goal, visualizing and defining what success looks like, creating a workable plan and sticking to it, and, importantly, bringing others along with you on the journey.
Here’s to a successful new year and a new you!
A previous version of the article appeared at The Huffington Post.
All images courtesy of Unsplash.
