It’s the start of a new year, a time of renewal, reflection, and goal-setting! Although setting New Year resolutions gets a bad reputation for being short-lived, the beginning of a new year can be a great time to re-evaluate how things are going and if you want to make changes. Too often, New Year goal setting turns into an opportunity to berate yourself about everything that is going wrong and then vow to do better with no real thought of how you will do this in a realistic manner. Whether or not you believe that New Year resolutions are useful or not, intention is a key aspect of reaching goals, and there are some well-tested strategies to increase your likelihood of following through.

Make Sure Your Intentions Are Based on Your True Desires

All kinds of influences impact the intentions that we have. These influences can be internally or externally motivated. External motivations can come from sources such as family obligations and perceived social norms. Internal motivations come from sources such as our values and personal goals. When thinking through our intentions, it is vital to understand if our intentions are internally or externally motivated. At times, goals that seem internally motivated can actually be coming from an external source.

Think about the desire to save up for a down payment for a bigger house. While a person may want a bigger house and it would be useful to the family, this motivation may also come from a sense of it just being the right thing to do or the next necessary step to keep up the appearance of being successful. To that, I say, “says who?” The answer to this seemingly flippant question is vital because people are more likely to stick with internally motivated intentions.

To determine if your intentions are based on what you truly desire and not from an external source, ask yourself why you want to reach a specific goal or incorporate a new habit into your life. Be honest with yourself, and then when you come up with the answer, ask why again. Keep going until you determine where your intention is coming from.

Make It Easy to Follow-Through

Setting an intention that comes from a place of personal value is only half the battle of increasing your likelihood of following through on your intentions. The other half is making it easy. There are several ways to make it easy to follow through on your intentions, and different methods will work best for different goals and personalities. For example, if you already have cash flow and want to increase your savings, consider automating your savings contributions so no additional actions are needed after you set up the recurring deposit into your savings account. If you want to learn more about investing, you could break down your process for learning into actionable tasks like reading a chapter a day of a book about investing or scheduling to take an investment course. By making it easy to follow through, you are removing obstacles to following through in advance, creating systems that support your ultimate goals without relying on willpower in the moment.

Why Intentions & Systems Don’t Always Work

We can talk about intentions and building systems all day. However, good intentions and building systems still may not lead to following through with your goal. To assess why you may be having trouble following through, start by asking yourself if this is something you truly want. Perhaps you are finding that this is not actually an internally motivated goal and need to think about it further. Alternatively, it could be the system you put in place. The system may not feel easy enough for you or other unforeseen challenges have popped up. You may need to go back to the drawing board for options to make your desired behavior feasible. It could also be that you do not currently have the resources to follow through on your intentions, such as time, money, or energy. Regularly checking in on your intentions and systems helps identify these issues and make more rapid adjustments, whether that means building a system that you are more likely to follow, adjusting your goals to match changing circumstances, or dropping intentions that no longer serve you. The ability to make adjustments is integral to the process of following through and helps take intentions from ideas to progress.