Plan Your New Year’s Resolutions Early
Human nature hasn’t changed much since the 1940s, when people vowed to “stop smoking”, “save more money”, “take better care of my health” and “live a better life” on New Year’s Day. We’re still trying to achieve all of these things and often struggling! So, if you’re thinking about eating healthier or hitting up the gym 3x a week in the new year, don’t wait– start your resolutions now! If you really want to reach that goal, you need to focus on the steps it takes to get there instead of waiting for 2024 to come and surprise you. Make plans now instead of falling into the same trap that we’ve all encountered for generations.
Here are some tips to help you achieve your 2024 New Year’s resolution—and all your future goals, too.
Be Specific about Your Goals
It’s easy to make general plans for the New Year, like “getting healthy” or “becoming more active.” But what does that mean, exactly? If you don’t define “healthy” or “more active” or whatever goal you’re working towards, it’s easy to get lost right out of the gate. Try to be precise about what you want to achieve, and that way you can measure your results. For example, instead of vowing to “get healthy this year”, how about trying to “lower my total cholesterol to less than 6.0”? Or, instead of deciding to “become more active”, could you try to “join an adult hockey team in Niagara”? The latter goals are ones that you can really quantify, so you’ll know exactly how to make them happen, and be able to celebrate when they’ve been achieved.
FYI, we can help set you up to achieve both of those goals at once! Aerobic exercise helps lower cholesterol, so you should check out our selection of ice skates for all ages and definitely join up with a team. If you’re more of an outdoor type, consider taking home a brand-new bike and hitting the road for some fresh air and exercise.
Don’t Make the Same Failed Resolutions as Last Year and the Year Before
Repeating the same resolutions year after year without success can be demoralizing and counterproductive. Instead, consider taking a reflective and proactive approach. Reevaluate your past resolutions, learn from your previous experiences, and identify the obstacles that hindered your success. Adjust your goals to be more realistic and achievable and break them down into manageable steps. By doing so, you can set yourself up for a higher chance of success and create a positive trajectory for personal growth. This shift in mindset allows you to leave behind the frustrations of past failures and embark on a journey of continuous improvement, making each new year an opportunity for genuine transformation.
Take a fresh approach to the same old goals. If you didn’t lose weight last year, find a way to tackle that goal without making that the focus this year. Instead, you could resolve to eat oatmeal for breakfast every weekday or pack a veggie-based lunch to work. You could resolve to learn and cook a new healthy recipe every week, or to start watching reruns of You Are What You Eat instead of Sugar Rush every evening. Your mindset is very important!
Start Before January 1st
Waiting until the last minute to make a big change usually involves too much wine, rich food and holiday candy throughout December, right up until midnight on the 31st. When you set a date to start a new habit and spend every minute up until that time doing the opposite, you’re probably going to crash and burn pretty quickly. There’s nothing magical happening on January 1st that lets everyone suddenly take up running, stop eating junk food, work harder, start a side hustle or learn a new language! Sure, you can start the journey towards your goal on New Year’s Day, but if your mind and body haven’t been practising already, it’s going to be tough to keep moving forward at full throttle. New habits must be eased into!
Here’s a little trick that Mel Robbins describes in her book, The 5-Second Rule: “The 5 Second Rule is simple. If you have an instinct to act on a goal, you must physically move within five seconds, or your brain will kill it. The moment you feel an instinct or a desire to act on a goal or a commitment, use the Rule.” What does this mean for New Year’s resolutions? It means they start whenever you get the idea, not at the stroke of midnight. If you have the wonderful, brilliant idea to return to the skating rink after ten years and get back into shape, guess what? The rink is open all winter. If you’re excited now, you need to act now. Look up your local rink hours and hit up Front Row Sports for skates and other gear. Otherwise, your brain will settle back down into its habits and fool itself into believing that your wonderful idea will take place sometime in the future. To your brain, the future only exists if it has a specific date—which is why it’s so easy to get trapped by the New Year’s resolution tradition.
The point is, there are many steps involved in any goal—whether it’s getting fit on the ice rink or eating less meat. You shouldn’t force yourself to take every step all at once, or you’ll get overwhelmed and potentially give up altogether. Take a step as soon as you have a goal and follow that with more steps in the days that follow. Get your skating gear. Look up meatless recipes. Start a free language learning app. Anything that gets you moving in the right direction.
Accept Your Setbacks & Keep Moving Forward
Listen, you’re not a terrible person for missing a day at the gym or eating a box of doughnuts. These things happen to everybody, all the time. The problem is not that you cheated on your diet or missed playing in a hockey game, but that you’re so devastated with yourself that you’re wallowing in despair. Don’t do that! You know what went wrong, so fix it. One doughnut day won’t cause you to suddenly put 10 pounds back on, and missing a game won’t take away all the health benefits you’ve earned from all those other games and practices. Give yourself a break and move on—this is one make or break moment, and there will be more. Did you know that starting your resolution before January first will help you learn to tackle your cravings, laziness and cheat days before they’re officially on the record? That’s right—and it’s all the more reason to start now.
Set Multiple Resolutions to Earn Big Rewards
If you’ve got your eye on a big prize—like losing 40 kilograms or earning a bachelor’s degree—it can help to take the focus off that one mountain of a goal and break it up into smaller, more easily achievable goals. For example, needing to lose 40 kilos feels overwhelming—but you could have a better chance of doing so if your immediate goals are to clear the junk food out of your house, do healthy meal prep, and go for a walk once a day. Setting smaller resolutions like these help you to start working towards a seemingly impossible goal without getting frustrated or worrying that you aren’t getting there quickly enough.
The same plan can work for sports training. If your big goal is to try out for your university basketball team next September, use your 2024 New Year’s resolution as motivation to spend more time practising. Promise yourself to hit the court twice a week (goal #1) and play friendly games with a local scrimmage group (goal #2). As the year progresses, you can add more goals or fine-tune the ones you already have—say, by adding an extra game day to the schedule, or spending one hour per practice session working on your free throws.
Get Organised
Assuming that your entire goal for 2024 isn’t just to get organised…there’s some prep work to do! Nothing makes a resolution harder to keep than being surrounded by chaos and disorganisation, which is why it’s important to dedicate some time to getting organised this year. Chaos comes in many forms, be it paperwork piled up on your work desk, unpacked boxes from a house move six months ago, or a lack of lists and schedules in your life. Whatever’s cluttering up or confusing your life on a daily basis, now’s the time to tackle it. Catch up on your filing, unpacking, laundry, recycling, family whiteboard calendar, house cleaning and work tasks to make room for what’s coming.
When everything’s caught up and you’re feeling totally in control of the space around you, you can start making plans to meet those New Year’s resolutions! And that—surprise!—means more organising. Decide on your goal-meeting strategy and schedule weekly activities on the calendar you just finished putting together. A daily task list and journal can help keep you on track. Your lists and notes don’t need to be fancy—a simple bulleted list of to-dos written on notepaper will suffice, while keeping journal entries of your daily goal-reaching activities and ideas can help you move forward and tweak your plans as you go.
Join an Accountability Group
Many people feel that it’s easier to meet a goal when held accountable for their progress. Eating a salad for lunch everyday is more likely to happen when you’ve told everybody that’s what you’re going to do! It can also be helpful to work together on goals—for example, if everybody at work wants to eat healthier lunches, you can all help each other to stay on track. After all, it’s a lot harder to eat salad every day while watching your co-worker’s scarf down burritos, burgers and potato chips than it is while sitting at a table full of other salad eaters.
Accountability groups are made up of people with specific goals who support each other in achieving those goals. You can make up your own, find one online (Facebook is full of these types of groups) or use an app like Habitica to connect with others who really want to make their New Year’s resolutions count. Of course, you can be a part of accountability communities all year long! Pay attention to people who have already accomplished what you’re working on and stay open to new tips about how to get there. Mostly, keep on taking steps towards your goals every day.
Reward Yourself for Doing a Good Job
It’s hard work to meet your goals, which is why you need to show yourself some love now and then. Rewarding yourself as you work towards meeting a New Year's resolution is a crucial aspect of maintaining motivation and staying committed to your goals. These well-deserved treats and moments of celebration serve as positive reinforcement, making the journey more enjoyable and sustainable. Whether it's a small indulgence after a successful week, a relaxing day off when you hit a major milestone, or simply acknowledging your progress with a sense of accomplishment, these rewards can boost your self-esteem and fuel your determination. By acknowledging your efforts and achievements, you not only make the path to your resolution more gratifying but also create a positive cycle of reinforcement that propels you closer to your desired outcome. In this way, the journey becomes as valuable as the destination itself, making it more likely that you'll not only reach your New Year's resolution but also maintain the positive changes in the long run.
Talk to Yourself
Cognitive and behavioural researchers are studying the effects of using your inner voice—or speaking to yourself out loud—to help soothe your natural impulses to keep eating, stop running, or generally quit before reaching a tough goal. It’s a tactic that you might already use! Many of us talk ourselves through tasks to stay focused when there are a lot of things going on. For example, while following a recipe that calls for multiple pots on the stove, or when filling out our tax forms. You can see contestants on the Great Canadian Baking Show talking themselves through technical baking instructions every episode. If you haven’t tried this before, give it a go! You might be surprised how much it helps keep you on track. If you aren’t sure how self-talk works, start by telling yourself out loud what you intend to do when working on a task: “30 push-ups, then 50 sit-ups,” you might say. If you’re stuck, tell yourself that’s okay: “Okay, rest a minute then 10 more.” When you reach the end, tell yourself that you did a good job—because you did!
Front Row Sports can Help You Achieve Your New Year’s Resolutions
We know that most people want to be more active and spend time doing things that are enjoyable—like figure skating, playing hockey, biking and playing ball. If you’re looking for a fun new hobby to enjoy in the coming year, visit us in-store for sporting goods in Niagara region! We’ll talk you through a couple of winter sports and activities to try out while there’s still a chill in the air and snow on the ground. If you want to change things up in the springtime, come on back and we’ll set you up with something new for the warm outdoors.
Take care of yourself this year!