Coming into the New Year, resolutions are made but not always executed like people would like. People may make goals that are difficult to achieve or make multi-step goals that can be hard to continue throughout the new year.

Now that we are into the new year, it’s time to evaluate where you are in meeting your resolutions.

First, it is important to make a goal that can be achieved in the new year and isn’t something that can be easily pushed to the side.

Setting a New Year’s resolution for yourself is a promise to improve your life in the coming year and can be a good way to help make a new change in your life; it may even start a new chapter in your life you never thought you would have started.

For example, if you make a resolution to work out more, you may become stronger than you thought possible and can now show up the people who said you weren’t.

Or, if you want to learn how to cook, you may find a new passion you never knew existed.

Resolutions can bring new light to your life that you don’t typically experience.

Goals allow you to grow and expand your knowledge, too. For example, consider pledging to read more, which will help in English or history class.

Setting your mind on goals you want to achieve can give you a drive that you haven’t experienced before, and that drive can be applied to other areas in your life, such as school, work, sports, etc.

For example, consider getting to work 15 minutes early to show timeliness and dependability.

A New Year’s resolution isn’t just a promise to yourself; it can also be a promise to someone else in your life. Resolutions can affect those around you, so simply making a resolution about being nicer to people or helping to clean the dishes after dinner for your parents can have a positive effect.

It can be hard to fulfill the resolution you set for yourself, especially if it is a very complex goal that takes time; therefore, here are four tips to making a resolution and achieving it:

1. Write a list of goals that you want to achieve in the new year; they can be complex, like running a marathon, or it can be something as simple as learning how to do laundry before heading to college. Don’t forget to write some that have a positive effect on the people around you.
2. Choose one from the list you wrote; if there are multiple resolutions you want to have for the new year, you can choose more than one, or you can choose the whole list, but make sure they can’t easily be pushed to the side.
3. Create a plan to achieve the resolution. Having checkpoints every week or two in the plan can make it easier to ensure that you complete the goal.
4. Implement the plan in your daily schedule and continue to carry it out until the resolution has been completed or becomes a habit.