Flipping the calendar to a new year seems like the perfect time to commit to becoming a better person — losing weight or quitting smoking or any number of other good ideas.
If you’ve ever gone to a gym the first week of January, you know plenty of people start the year with good intentions. If you stick around until about Valentine’s Day, you know lots of those good intentions die pretty quickly.
This week I’ll blog about some suggestions for making — and keeping — resolutions.
Why should you make resolutions anyway? Isn’t it just a superficial tradition?
Arial Hyatt pointed me to this inspiring article by John Lloyd about the power of having clear goals and writing them down.

In 1984, the late Mark H. McCormack wrote the bestseller What They Don’t Teach You At Harvard Business School. He wrote about a research study conducted at Harvard between 1979 and 1989. In 1979, the MBA graduates were asked, “Have you set clear, written goals for your future and made plans to accomplish them?” Only 3 percent had clear written goals and action plans to achieve them. Thirteen percent of the graduates had goals, but they were not in writing. The other 84 percent had no specific goals at all.
In 1989, a decade later, the researchers again interviewed the students of that class. Surprisingly, they discovered that the 13 percent, who had goals that were not in writing, were earning on average twice as much as the 84 percent who had no goals at all.
The truly amazing finding was that the 3 percent of students, who had written, clear goals when they left Harvard, were earning over 10 times as much, on average, as the other 97 percent together.
What is a goal? A goal is simply a personal set of instructions, that when followed, yield a selected and pre-determined result.

Ariel writes much more about goal setting here — check it out to get more good ideas. Two of her pointers that resonate for me: (my wording, not hers, but the ideas are taken from Ariel)

• don’t feel like you’re setting your goals in stone — they can evolve as you go. I think of this as planning a road trip. You know where you’re headed and the route you want to take, but if you realize once you’re under way that there’s road construction or accident, or you suddenly get inspired to make a side trip, you can. But you needed to know where you were going in the first place or you’d never get out of the driveway.
• celebrate your successes. Instead of beating yourself up about not getting all the way to your ambitious goal, celebrate the progress you made. This is what’s referred to as not letting great get in the way of good. If you only lose eight pounds instead of 10, that’s still in the right direction. What would you have done if you hadn’t set a goal at all?

I blogged back in March about declaring what you want in a written goal list — check out that post if you haven’t read it before.
Are you setting any resolutions this year? What are they and what will you to actually make them happen?