First of all, congratulations on surviving the apocalypse! Considering we all get the chance to celebrate another new year, you might want to consider this as a pivotal point for change. As cliché as it sounds, leaping into a brand new year is commonly associated with making promises to ourselves for the new year.
I started writing my New Year’s promises when I was 12. Only recently did I realize that our resolve to stick to our resolutions is similar to our resolve to do our best during the academic years. Most of us start Week 1 with excessive enthusiasm. We make promises to ourselves that there will be no more slacking off and that we will increase our level of kiasu-ness. As the weeks pass, we will start rewarding ourselves by hours (and more hours) of browsing or retail therapy. Finally, when we reach the end of the semester, we will start recounting all the empty promises we made. Eventually, some of us will realize this cycle and stop making promises at all. We become tired and discouraged eventually.
Have you ever experienced such broken New Year’s resolutions? The RIDGE has come up with several tips on how to set resolutions–and make them happen.
- We always live in two worlds: the ideal world and the real one. It is not a sin to aim as high as the seventh sky, as long as we keep our feet on the ground. In other words, try to set our goals as high as possible but do evaluate them. Is it possible to fulfill them in one year’s time? Or should it be a long term goal, accomplished over the next few years?
- Being extremely specific will encourage you to fulfill your goal without ‘cheating’. For instance, instead of putting down ‘being healthier’ as one of your resolutions, you might want to write down ‘walk from Kent Ridge MRT to the Science building instead of taking the bus’.
- Don’t just write down the changes you want to make. You should also list down the ways to make those changes. Let’s say you are a heavy smoker who smokes more than one pack of cigarettes per day. Your goal is to quit smoking once and for all. You might want to set monthly incremental goals to achieve zero cigarettes per day rather than to try to quit all at once.
- Most importantly, determination and consistency are the keys. In order to remind yourself about your resolutions, you can start by writing down your resolutions in your diary or sticking it on visible places that you can see daily or even hourly. To keep your determination, you might want to add some motivating quotes along with the list. Pro-tip: Write them down using brightly-coloured inks.