In everyday life, setting yourself up for success starts with planning, preparation, and intentional thinking. Going into the new year, having a sense of what you want to do and achieve is important. You reflect on the previous year, think about what you could have done differently, and you carry that into the new calendar year. New Year’s resolutions have been around since any of us can remember, but a lot of people don’t take them very seriously. Going into the new year, knowing what you want to do and achieve is best organized by creating your New Year’s resolutions and treating them like a serious guide to self-efficacy and accountability.
As students, it is natural to learn from your mistakes and your previous experiences. Whether they were positive or negative, growing and learning from your previous semesters is an important skill to have as a young learner. New Year’s resolutions can help set a tone for your year, and they can even help you develop your mindset reflecting on past decisions and experiences.
It’s like planning out an essay, before you start writing, you have your outline and all the information you need to write it. Your year is that essay; you want to have a rough plan of what you want to achieve, and an idea of what you’ll need to do in order to fulfill that outline. There’s a reason professors provide outlines and provide you the information you need to complete an assignment. They know and understand that by maintaining focus, a good result and a good grade comes naturally. Keeping you on course is exactly what resolutions are great for. By creating and committing to your New Year’s resolutions seriously, you are able to lead an ideal year, being able to fulfill the expectations you set for yourself in the beginning.
According to Pew Research Center and their research on New Year’s resolutions, 70% of Americans do not make resolutions at all and 56% of those Americans just do not like to make them. Nonetheless, setting and committing to these resolutions is vital and very important to the youth, especially after high school and while in college. Not a lot of community college students plan for travelling to Paris or putting a down payment on a new house or car, however, that makes it all the more important for students to set themselves goals for the year. There’s a whole academic year to think about; there are goals such as getting a good grade, passing a class, interacting with new people and clubs. When you don’t make a New Year’s resolution, or even lack giving it any thought, you leave a lot of situations up to chance. Goals turn into, “maybes.” When you ignore the creation of your resolutions, you set your year up with lenience and a lack of direction.
Having such an expansive amount of opportunities as college students, honing a focus on certain goals through New Year’s resolutions is a surefire way to stay on top of your responsibilities, as a student and as a young adult. Whether they are big goals you know you’ll work hard to achieve or small goals you just want to see crossed off, having guidance will lead you towards structure and success.
