By Collin McDonald

New Years Resolutions. Practically everyone makes them. Whether they be small or huge goals, people everywhere have things that they would love to change about their lives. Sure, these new year goals seem amazing at first, but people tend to forget all the hard work that it takes to make life adjustments. And when the hard work is presented to them, they completely throw away their resolution. In order to avoid this travesty, here are some simple yet effective tips that will help make your resolutions a reality.

What I tend to notice about peoples’ resolutions is that they wait to begin making changes to their lives until New Years day. If you ask me, this is a disastrous approach. What people should do, is start implementing their resolutions in their lives a few weeks or even months before the new year rolls around. That way, they establish a nice routine that will carry over beautifully into the new year. For example, if someone wanted to exercise more as their resolution they should start exercising before the new year. By doing so, their new year’s resolution will have a higher chance of surviving when the next year comes. However, if they chose to start exercising on January 1st, it would be harder for them to actually follow through in the long run. Most likely, after the first week or so they would realize the difficulty of the task at hand, become discouraged and lazy, and throw their resolution down the toilet.

Another effective strategy to encourage the success of your resolutions is to team up with friends and/or family members. This works for virtually any kind of resolution you could think of! The more people you know who strive to accomplish the same things you do, the more likely that you will actually accomplish them. For example, if you come from a family who absolutely loves binging on snacks (like a lot of families do) and all of you want to do less snacking, why not join forces and support each-other? It might even be a fun to have some friendly competition with them to see who ate the less snacks in a week!

Remember, it is never to late to make changes to your life! Just because you didn’t stick to your resolution for the first month of the new year doesn’t mean that you should give up. Just keep trying and trust me, you’ll be so proud of the work you put in to reach your goal!