Are You Still on Track for Your New Year’s Resolutions?

Valentine’s Day has come and gone. While it is a day typically spent to celebrate with your significant other, it is also a day to celebrate you! Taking care of your well-being also translates to more love and happiness you can spread for others. Developing consistent productive habits therefore become part of that self care. This is also the time of year most people fall of the wagon for their New Year’s Resolutions. This article shows my attempt to build and maintain these good habits for the long term. I hope you can find some inspiration here, and find these tips useful. 

In order to to take care of yourself and achieve happiness, I believe it boils down to mastery in several categories: 

Health

• To have the energy and vitality to do the activities we love

Finance

• To be able to spend money on things we value and give back to others
• To feel secure that we can take care of ourselves until we leave this Earth

Relationships

• To have good relationships with ourselves so we know what makes us happy
• To communicate our happiness and boundaries, so we can share joy with others and elevate each other to be the best versions of ourselves

Self Improvement

• To consistently check in and be aware of ourselves and make progresses along the way
• Enjoying the small wins and evolving to be better versions of ourselves
• Seeing “failures” as simply feedback in how we can improve

Contribution and Fulfillment

• Spending our days on meaningful work that makes us feel fulfilled
• Giving back to society and leaving our legacy

Learning to Make These Habits Stick

I have always had a hard time being consistent for the long haul, but I know it’s achievable. After all, I do make my bed everyday, and brush my teeth twice a day, so I know I got this in me! I just need to repeat the actions enough time to make it an instinctual habit. Most experts say it takes 28 days to form a habit. For the sake of ease, I will simply start a habit and stick to it for one month.

Here are the habits I want to cultivate consistently this year. 

Health

• Exercise – cardio, resistance training and flexibility
• Healthy Eating, and home cooked meals
• Water
• Mental – Meditation

Finance

• Budget and keeping track of expenses
• Save 45% of income and invest to fast track to financial independence
• Educate myself through financial blogs and podcasts

Relationships

• Talk to a different friend daily
• Attending conferences
• Following up with new friends
• Seeing my friends and family once a month
• Deep communication and teamwork with my SO

Self Development

• Self awareness – meditation and journaling
• Reading daily
• Podcasts or audiobooks during commute

Contribution and Fulfillment

• Developing this blog to share my journey of self development, adventure and pursuit of financial independence
• Sharing on social media 3 times a week
• Blog post once a week

Here are the strategies I am employing to make this process easier.

Make it Easy

When I make new year’s resolutions, I tend to be very ambitious and start all kind of new habits at once. This usually leads to overwhelm and eventually a feeling of defeat. Then it involves me throwing in a towel or two. This year, however, I am going to do the following:

• Make it very accessible

My action: I joined the YMCA membership that are 5 mins walk from the multiple locations that I frequent. Less friction, no excuses!

• Picking only very few habits to start, to increase confidence I can follow through and minimize overwhelm

My action: In the first month, I have only focused on exercise as my first habits to start. Since health is one of those keystone habits that has the biggest impact that positively influence everything else because of increased energy.

The key is to make it so easy that you have no problem sticking to your habits. That is all that counts at the beginning. Once you get the momentum going, you will naturally improve your workouts and create lasting results.

Break It Down

When most people set goals, they set a goal that is too ambitious compared to their current situation. In my case, I would like to cook more at home, and I used to aim for cooking every meal from scratch. However, this creates a lot of resistance because I am so used to just eating out and having the food ready to eat.

However, here is how I am breaking down this habit into smaller steps:

• Stage 1: Buy takeout and eat it at home. I was used to eating out. This step gets me used to just the act of eating at home.
• Stage 2: Buy pre-cooked meals at the grocery stores. This gets me used to going to the grocery stores, but it is still relatively painless and there is no prepping required.
• Stage 3: Buy pre-cut, pre-washed vegetables, ready to use sauces and pre-made proteins and put it together. This cuts down on the prepping time and you simply have to put it together.
• Stage 4: Make your food from scratch. This the healthiest and most affordable way to eat because you get to control what you put into your food.

This process helps me to slowly ease into building a habit of cooking, and even though the steps might be elementary, I am still making progress, and that’s all that counts.

Give Yourself a Reward for the Habit

If you can find a reward not only to incentivize you to form your habit, but also synergistic to your outcome, you got a winning combination.

• For example, I would visit the sauna after every swim as a reward. I enjoy that feeling of relaxation and it helps my body rejuvenate after a workout.

Break Into a Smaller Habit When Demotivated

There will be days that I feel demotivated. Instead of falling prey into the all or nothing approach, simply scaling the habit down even further still means you did something!

My action: On the second day of building my swimming routine, I was already feeling lazy. I simply got into the gym and hit the sauna. That’s it. No workout, no swimming. But it reinforces my habit of going to the gym, and that is again what matters at the beginning.

My Mission

Voila! Here is my process of working on building consistent habits. My mission with this blog is to show you my journey of how I tackle the different facets of life and share with you what I am learning. It definitely won’t even be close to perfect (and there is no perfect anyways), but I hope it inspires you or spark discussions of how we can make our lives the best we can.

Life can be hard but I hope in sharing my struggles and lessons we can learn from each other and know that we are not alone.

Thank you for reading and please share below if you have any comments or questions.