Approaching New Year’s resolutions

While pursuing my Master of Divinity, I worked as a personal trainer in downtown Chicago. During that time, I trained busy professionals who wanted to get and stay in shape — “busy” is the operative word. Fitness was seldom the biggest priority in my client’s lives. Still, they didn’t want to ignore their physical health or appearance.

My guess is that most people have pretty busy lives — I know I do. It can be a challenge to make changes and pursue personal goals because adding something to my plate normally requires that I drop something else off my plate. So, as we move toward 2024, I began to think about how I could set a New Year’s resolution that I could realistically keep. I came up with a few tips.

First, choose a realistic resolution. We often overshoot when we are making our resolutions. For instance, last year I committed to getting up at five in the morning for 30 days straight. The timeframe was reasonable. It gave me enough time to see if a 5 a.m. wake-up call would be sustainable. Turns out it wasn’t.

By setting a shorter-term goal, I was able to decide if what I had tried was something I wanted to continue. I do the same thing with my workouts. If I want to try to work out five days per week, I first commit to doing it for a month or six weeks to see how consistent I can actually be (and how my body feels). Using smaller and shorter-term goals gives you the opportunity to assess your resolution, modify it, and make ongoing changes that fit with your lifestyle more generally.

Second, don’t feel like you need to start your resolution on January 1. The New Year is, in many ways, a fairly arbitrary starting point. There is nothing magical about the first day of January. It shouldn’t be the litmus test for whether you will succeed at keeping your resolution or not. In particular, if you decided to watch the ball drop the night before or go to a New Year’s Eve party, you may not be feeling particularly well-rested on January 1.

Rather than defaulting to January 1, consider when you will be in the best position to start your resolution. For example, I know that I have a family trip that ends on the 15th. Travel is notorious for getting me off kilter. Something always seems to happen. As such, I’m planning to start my resolution after that trip.

Our resolve will often be tested. In my experience, it is tested early and often. Choose a time when you believe you will have the best shot of getting off on the right foot with your resolution. Don’t worry if it isn’t until the end of January. The point, after all, isn’t to say that you are going to make some change but to actually make the change you say you are going to make.

Third, try thinking in terms of minimums instead of maximums. For example, when I was a personal trainer, many of my clients would commit to doing cardio three times per week for at least 30 minutes per session. While that may have been ideal, moving from zero cardio to 30 minutes three times per week is not trivial.

Instead of shooting for the ideal, I started recommending that they shoot for a minimum. If they were doing no cardio, I suggested that they think about doing some type of physical activity for 10 minutes every day. That activity could be cardio. It could also just be walking around their neighborhood. When they had the time and inclination, they could certainly do more than 10 minutes, but the goal was to do at least 10 minutes.

I found that this helped my clients by allowing them to A) achieve a relatively simple goal and B) build consistency. You could easily do this with something like prayer or Bible study. The idea is to set yourself up for success rather than shooting for the moon and hitting the stars. As you discipline yourself to do a small task, you can ramp up to bigger and bigger goals.

Fourth, play to your strengths. I’ve always been a reader and a writer, so when I became a Christian, studying the Bible and reading theology came easy to me. Some other disciplines, like prayer, didn’t. After doing some writing on prayer recently, I felt that I needed to be more intentional in strengthening my practice of prayer. I decided to start by reading prayers — not reading about prayers, but actually getting a book of prayers and reading through them. I then started writing my own prayers and praying back through them. Rather than sitting down and trying to pray in a less structured way, I decided to lean into what I was already good at: reading and writing.

Setting New Year’s resolutions can be a good way to clarify what you really care about; however, they can also cultivate disappointment if we fail to achieve them. In the New Year, set yourself up for success. Don’t just make a resolution because it’s the New Year and you feel like you should. Do it because you want to commit to changing something in your life that is hindering your walk with Christ. While that can certainly involve spending more consistent time in God’s Word, it may also involve getting more exercise or more rest. It may involve watching less television or spending less time scrolling on your phone.

Whatever it is that is keeping you from growing in your relationship with Christ will be worth the time and effort to change because as we conform more closely to Him we will find opportunities to build the Kingdom of God beyond anything we could ever ask or think.