The new year is just around the corner. Time to think of good intentions! We all have them, yet we rarely stick to them. This is how you can maintain your good intentions in 2024.
Be realistic
New year new me right? You can achieve anything in the new year! This is true, but you shouldn’t go too fast. When setting good intentions, we sometimes overestimate ourselves a bit. You only notice this when you start working on your good intentions. Then you discover that perhaps it is just a bit too ambitious for you. This is okay, but it can make your motivation disappear quickly. Therefore, be realistic when writing down your good intentions. Consider whether the things you want to do fit into your current lifestyle. For example, can you really exercise every day if you have to work late five days a week? If you can do this, this is great! But don’t be mad at yourself if this isn’t the case.
Start small
As soon as the new year has started, we are all very excited and want to get started right away when it comes to our New Year’s resolutions. We spontaneously start eating super healthy food and exercising a lot. This is of course great, but there is a good chance that you will not be able to keep this up for long. To ensure that you continue with your new habits, it is better to start small. For example, start exercising twice a week and see how that goes and then increase the number of times you go to the gym. And instead of suddenly banning all unhealthy food, you can also start by eating less sweets or drinking less soft drinks.
Set up checkpoints for yourself
Motivation is important to really stick to your good intentions. To motivate yourself, it is good to give yourself checkpoints to work towards. For example, you can have a good resolution that you want to read more in 2024. Then you can have as a checkpoint that you want to have read a certain number of books in March. A whole year is long and overwhelming, so spreading your goal over the months is a lot more manageable.
Formulate your good intentions correctly
When writing down good intentions, we don’t always think enough about how we formulate them. We write down that we want to lose weight, exercise more or eat healthier. But by formulating your good intentions in this way, it becomes more difficult for yourself to keep them. They are too vague. Be specific and clear. Instead of exercising more, you can say that you want to be able to run for a certain time, squat a certain weight or go to the gym a certain number of times a week. With a clear goal in mind, you can also work in a more targeted manner.
Keep your list short
Finally, we talked about being realistic before. This point ties in nicely with this. Because it is not realistic to have twenty good intentions. You will never be able to sustain them all. Therefore, keep your list short and achievable so that you really have something to be proud of at the end of the year.
