By Hannah Trezise
Happy New Year! This past week, the Kappa Kappa Psi North Central District Alumni Association (NCDAA) celebrated the coming of a new year, and said goodbye to 2021 with its Webchat Wednesday. As both the NCDAA Growth & Wellness chair and a self-proclaimed New Year’s resolution fanatic, the conversations that I have around this time at our annual Webchat Wednesdays delight me and help me prepare myself for my next year’s goals.
Setting New Year’s resolutions can be great for your health! People set goals for themselves for fitness, for mental health, and other realms of wellbeing (social, environmental, financial, etc.). Setting these types of resolutions can be rewarding; however, they can also be challenging. I’ve failed a number of resolutions in the past, mainly for thinking too lofty, only to bow out on the second week of January. Take it from a seasoned resolution-veteran: it’s about how you plan, and the reasoning behind the resolution, as much as it is about the “What” of your goal.
So, let’s assume you have some goals in mind for 2022. You want to read more, or you want to invest more in your fitness, or perhaps you want to connect with your Kappa Kappa Psi brothers more. If you want to challenge yourself to meet your 2022 New Year’s resolutions, you should consider the “What?” “How?” and “Why?” of your resolutions, breaking them apart into reasonable and achievable pieces.
Take, for instance, a few of my own goals:
Write a book by end of December 2022
Travel one place new
Run a half marathon
A few of these seem lofty (namely the writing a book one), but I promise these are more manageable than what meets the eye. I’ll break that first one down;
What: Writing a Book. That’s not very concrete, so let’s say it’s a 300 page book of pages that are each 250 words. That’s writing 75,000 words total over 365 days. That sounds like 1,500 words a week, more or less. That, I can do.
How: I’ve bought journals, and I’m setting aside a certain amount of time every day to write creatively with the intention of working on a story. Since I’ve already plotted some of it, I feel a little less intimidated about the prospect of sitting down with this and writing in 2022. I have writer friends who are holding my accountable, and I am giving myself small goals the achieve (ie: writing 2 chapters a month).
Giving yourself a plan for execution will bring your lofty goals a bit closer to the ground. If you’re trying to get more into fitness, are you setting a goal of a certain amount of minutes with your weights or your running shoes? If you’re trying to expand upon your cooking skills, are you planning to try a new meal every week, or every month? Ultimately, planning your goal out week by week or month by month will lay out a roadmap for success, so that you can achieve by the end of 2022.
Why: The fuel! Very important for goals. If you’ve ever been in a Kappa Kappa Psi goal-setting workshop, you probably know that knowing and understanding the “Why” behind what you’re planning is critical for getting it done. For me, this comes down to 1. always wanting to write a book, and 2. Having far too many ideas bubbling up in my head with few coming to fruition. It’s time.
Once you’ve figured out these three items, you’ll be in a much better place to achieve your New Year’s resolutions. That being said, don’t stress too much if you find yourself losing steam throughout the year. We’re only human— we’ve got family, friends, and work to prioritize. The important thing is that you’re making any progress at all. If you’re making the effort to learn or change in 2022, that’s something you should be proud of.