New year resolutions are vows people make annually after considerable reflections of the previous year.

Surprisingly, like the pledges average teenagers make as they resume the day’s curriculum, only to find themselves breaking school rules before the end of the term, various people with supposed “New Year Resolutions” forget about them before the first quarter of the new year.

Setting goals for the year, nonetheless, is not a stupid thing to do. Take away the intents of those resolutions, and what you’re left with are mere principles that choke up your freedom to exhale.

You might have been told many things about the importance of starting the new year with resolutions, and now you’re subconsciously caged up inside the territory of your own engineering.

The fears, the anxieties, and myths surrounding new year resolutions – what to do with them? Trash or track?

5 MYTHS ABOUT NEW YEAR RESOLUTIONS AND WHY YOU SHOULD TRASH THEM

1. New Year Resolutions Keep You Focused

Not only is this mythical, but the overstatement passes easily as a joke.

Staying focused has nothing to do with resolutions. If it were so, people wouldn’t continue the familiar routine of recycling the same resolutions until the idea becomes boring.

Every year, millions of people buy into the idea of new year resolutions only to eat their own words before February comes knocking.

Bring the scenario home to a local church that dishes out instructions for the week, emphasizing immensely on scriptural examples, and the whole congregation begins to look like an assembly of Mother Theresas until the church closes and they get home.

The impatient one would hardly get home before resetting his moral chronometer back to level zero. He runs the traffic light, takes the wrong lane to beat traffic, pays a bribe to the corrupt police officers at the check-point, and then returns home to his “normal.”

If this is one of the compasses your idea of a resolution is based on, trash it!     

2. New Year Resolutions Are Your Foresight Towards A Sustainable Tomorrow

The idea behind this myth is to convince individuals of the potency in setting long term goals. However, it misses the objective through the carefully constructed exaggeration.

Your foresight is your ability to see and prepare intelligently for the future. New year resolutions can only do as much as pointing a few details that your mind can still recollect.

Ironically, there are more than 300 days still waiting and pregnant with uncertainties that will make your resolution look like a mere recitation.

Let’s assume you intend to use your savings to buy shares advertised by a particular company. You and your brothers or solicitor have probably examined every possible outcome, but what you didn’t know is that your girlfriend would get pregnant six weeks later, and the scan will find triplets, and the company director would be investigated for fraud.

You couldn’t see the whole picture, so you decided to use the immediate problems to analyze the event of an entire year.

That myth betrays your intelligence and ability to use your logic. Trash it.

3. “I’m A Brand New Person.”

You probably had your hand on your chest while you muttered this to yourself.

This article is not criticizing your ability to change certain habits like smoking, drunk driving, over-eating, bullying, alcoholism, anger problems, or going back to your ex over and again, etc.

It addresses the idea of encircling your whole year around specific promises that may be too far-fetched or impossible to accomplish, looking at the limitations in the context.

Addictions cannot be conquered by merely making promises or relying on the motivations that charged you into initiating the intention (no matter how seriously).

Relying only on the words you say when creating a new year resolution is like going into a grocery store with the hope of purchasing with a lottery ticket.

A better counsel is to start with the simplest things you can do. You can wake up early to run a few miles, cut down on your junk foods, visit the gym occasionally, call your loved ones more often, go to AA meetings, read a book or two, and so on.

If you’re not ready to create that change through conscious and deliberate efforts, then trash the idea because you may continue the cycle of saying the same thing every year with a diminishing sense of value and confidence.

4. Big Goals Are Better than Small Ones

A high school in Iowa was fond of promoting some unconventional types of sports. One particular sport had to do with picking pieces of rocks from 5 miles out and placing them on a scale until it hits 2 kilograms.

Participants were divided into a team of 3 girls. While others were busy looking for the heaviest rocks to win the game in an instant, one team kept going back and forth, picking smaller pieces of rock until they won the game.  

Many people are fond of setting high-standard and sometimes unrealistic goals, only to fail and continue the cycle.

If you’re going to save, start with something that won’t affect your budget as time goes on.

Don’t start with allotting 30% of your monthly income into your savings only to revisit the plan, and consequently, the savings before the set date.

You’re more likely to achieve goals that are broken into small, specific steps. Make a habit of celebrating these small steps along the way to meeting your big goal.

5. “Keep Your New Year Resolutions General In Order to Succeed”

The idea of keeping your resolutions general was probably borne out of the notion to have an overview that encompasses any eventuality occurring in the year.

But the idea is both lazy and vague. Being generic about your goals leaves room for assumptions and guessing games.

Going into unfamiliar territory without a map is the quickest way to get lost. The excitement of the new year is overwhelming and can easily deter you from having a carefully thought out plan – a plan with precision.

From the very moment you formulate a general overview as a resolution, instead of a zeal to push for success, you’ve succeeded in incapacitating the objectives.

When there’s no clear path to follow, any road will look like it. Do not subscribe to this myth; it lacks vision. Trash it!

Conclusion

Instead of a compilation of ambiguous plans and promises that consumes your willingness to pursue your goals, create short term goals that guide you to the destination you’re aiming for, one step at a time.

It is often difficult to stay committed when all you do is try to keep up with a bunch of promises. You most likely would end up beating yourself up from time to time for not making considerable progress.

Pablo Picasso, the world-famous Spanish painter, sculptor, poet, and playwright amongst many others, says, “Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.”

So, what do you think?