Working Hard On Your Resolutions

2015 has began for more than a week now, and Iris and I are already struggling to keep majority of our new year resolutions intact, such as the daily routine of making our beds, or keeping things neat and tidy in the house.

Such are the struggles of people who set new year resolutions, and we hope to believe that we are not the only ones. Surely not an excuse? Yes it's not.

I've come to realize that keeping a resolution going through the year is a big challenge, and that's where in the past week I had been pondering on 90-day long resolutions instead of lengthy year-long resolutions. Why so?

1. Some year-long goals are better replaced by progressive 90-day goals. For example, if staying fit is your goal, then you can begin by light weekly exercises for a start. Progressively over time, you can increase the frequency to twice a week run or increase the intensity of your training.
2. 90-day goals make you feel accomplished and motivated. As with the previous example, your stage-one 90-day goal are more "bite-sized" for you to finish and complete them, and that will give you a big morale boost to work them out. 
3. 90-day goals may be better for your own health. Sometimes we have to decide if a shorter-term goal is better suited for us instead of year-long ones. For example, if you plan to do a marathon, 90-day goals will help to plan your training properly to minimize any physical injuries. 

In shorter words, 90-day goals are hugely customizable and more realistic. "One size fits all" works less wonderful with a customized 90-day plan, and there are more benefits to it than in theory when worked out. 

Having said that, first and foremost, I find myself having to battle a few personal disciplines first:

1. Self Discipline. This is a huge personal concern, as I often opt for other 'activities' rather than to get to the real business. 
2. Procrastination. This is another excuse I give myself, especially when sometimes you have the luxury of time and yet chose not to do it. 
3. Attitude. This is something rather lacking, as with a good attitude you can get done your goals and plan in a shorter amount of time. 

So I am going to tackle all these and being working out my resolutions. No excuses, no more procrastination and delays.

New Year, New Resolutions

When I was in youth ministry in my previous church, we never fail to get the youths to do up a brief reflections of the past year and doing up a resolution list for the new year. Some youths frown at the annual routine exercise of the year, while some eagerly anticipate the quiet 'stock take' opportunity of their lives in the year.

Just how good and helpful are resolutions and how do we set for ourselves a good resolution? More importantly, how do we keep our resolutions and work them out through the year? (Read an interesting article on why resolutions are so hard to follow here.)

I cannot help but insist that resolutions and goals are indefinitely helpful and essential to our personal growth and development if we set good and achievable goals.

While we set the youths to take time to reflect upon their year, we often draft up and categorize their lives into different parts, such as physical, spiritual, social and family, and studies. We find that by categorizing into these simple and brief domains of their lives, it becomes easier for them to set goals for themselves. For example, for physical they may set a goal of a weekly exercise. For spiritual, they may set a goal of reaching out to a friend, or attending church weekly. For social and family, they may want to spend more time with their parents, or more time with a socially-outcast friend. For studies, they may simply aim to get a certain grade for a struggling subject, and so on.

We often have leaders to guide them along and have them duplicate a copy of their goals to their CG leaders for accountability's sake. And together as a CG, we have the CG leader to set cell group goals as a common benchmark for the members to work together and reach their goals.

To help everyone along, we instructed them to set SMART goals, which essentially stands for:

- Specific: it mustn't be too general, and often asking yourselves the 6 'W's (Who, Where, What, When, Which, and Why) will help to streamline your goals to a more specific one. For example, to get into shape would be a general goal, whereas to join a gym and workout two times a week would be a specific goal.

- Measurable: your goals must be measurable, or in other words have a basic criteria of measurement. This will help you break up your goals to small bits so as to help you work towards your end goal. For example, if the goal is to run a full marathon, it will be helpful to break it up into bite-size, such as to attempt first a 6km run, and subsequently a 12km, a 18km, and so on.

- Achievable: your goals must also be within reach and realistic. For example, one can be ambitious and set a goal to reach the moon. But while doing so he or she might have forgotten to ask if the required attitudes, abilities, skills and financial capacity to accomplish the goal is within the required reach.

- Relevant: goals must be personal and relevant to your self. For example, it would be meaningless to set a goal of walking the dog if we fail to realize that it is a need for the dog and not for ourselves, and neither is it relevant to set a goal to be closer to your own dog when it does not achieve a certain purpose.

- Time-bound: usually we set yearly goals, which inadvertently determines a year-long time frame to accomplish the goal. A common misconception is that goals are to be limited to a year, however that need not to be the case. For example, for a youth to get into shape it may not require a full year but six months instead. Hence, our goals can be a 6-month goal, or a 90-days goal, which can be more achievable and realistic.

Recently there was an article on why 90-day goals are better than year-long ones. Read more on the article here.

This sums up how and what kind of goals we encourage our youths to set up for themselves, and you can likewise do the same.

So, what new year resolutions and goals have you set for yourselves in 2015?