Start Making Progress Toward Your Goals (Again)

If your vow to HIIT harder or eat more veggies has fizzled out, don’t let it sap your confidence. Promises we make to ourselves aren’t always easy to keep, as a landmark University of Scranton study found. Only 19 percent of 200 people who made New Year’s resolutions stuck with them for at least two years.

No worries if you’re in that 81 percent. Here are five small, simple steps that can help you make progress toward any goal and keep your spirit strong too.

Nebulous goals do not work, says Nick Wignall, PhD, a clinical psychologist and the host of Minds & Mics, a mental health and performance podcast. “Yes, eating healthier, getting in shape and improving your sleep are really good things to do,” he says. “The problem is they’re conceptual and vague; they don’t have much motivating pull.”

For a routine to really grab you, says Wignall, you need to get superspecific about why it matters. To do that, start asking questions. For example, if you want to get stronger, ask yourself why that’s important to you. What immediate and long-term benefits will you get? How will your life look different if you stick to a strength-training routine? Answering these why, what and how queries takes you from “I want to be stronger” to “I want to lift weights because it makes me feel powerful, confident and like I can tackle everyday challenges more easily.” Now that’s a goal with some gravity.

A simple, effective way to feel compelled to follow through: Put a calendar on your desk or wall, and for each day you stick to your healthy routine — eating a veggie with every meal, getting in bed by 10 pm — draw a red X or any color-symbol combo that speaks to you. Wignall calls this the “big red-X strategy” (BRXS), and it has a trifecta of payoffs.

First, BRXS forces your routine front and center. Now you have a clear, constant reminder, says Wignall. Second, making that X is rewarding, and that’s a feeling you’ll work to score again and again. “Immediately getting to use your big red marker to cross off a day is much more rewarding than saying, ‘If I do 30 days of exercise, then I’m going to the spa.’”

Finally, seeing all of those beautiful red X’s in a row reinforces all the awesome progress you’ve made, which should boost your confidence, says Wignall.

When it comes to making changes, we often hear a voice in our head telling us how to feel, and it tends to take one of two tones. The first is “the drill sergeant,” the tough, burly guy who yells at recruits in war movies, says Wignall. The second is “the shamer,” says Sasha Heinz, PhD, a developmental psychologist and mindset coach who specializes in goal-setting and behavior change. This is the voice saying that you must get fit or eat better because otherwise you’ll be unacceptable or unworthy.

Both are destructive. “When you are really hard on yourself, you create excess negative emotion, which just provides more friction between you and your goal,” says Wignall. “Remove that burden, and it’s amazing how much energy you can have to move toward what you want.”

Try saying aloud the wellness goal you’re aiming to hit. Now, listen to how the voice in your head instantly reacts. Is it telling you, “Yep, you’ve got this”? Or is it yelling and dictating, like the sergeant, or making you feel bad about yourself, like the shamer?

If the answer is one of the latter, reframe your self-talk to be kind, encouraging or even neutral. This can be as simple as replacing words like “must,” “need” and “should” with more positive verbs like “can,” “want” and “will.” Then, says Wignall, see what happens next. “When, inevitably, you end up doing just fine if not better, your brain will register that there’s no benefit to putting yourself down,” he says.

Say you’re trying to run regularly. It might suck to set your alarm for sunrise, but it also feels amazing each time you complete a workout. Heinz says to obsess over that second part. When your brain drifts to the ugh moments in your routine, pull it back to the positives. Yes, going to bed early is difficult, but you always feel refreshed in the morning. Yes, doing a warm-up takes time, but you haven’t been injured in months.

Still find yourself dwelling on the hard parts? Heinz recommends considering how much tougher life would be if you were blowing off your goal. This outlook can lead you to a “radical truth,” she says: that these actions add up to a better quality of life.

To prepare for the inevitable bumps in your journey, Wignall suggests following this go-to mantra from motivation expert James Clear: Never miss twice. In other words, if you skipped your run or stayed up half the night watching TV, tell yourself it won’t happen again. “This urges ambition and working hard to keep up your routine,” explains Wignall, “but it also includes self-compassion, an understanding that you can and will miss once in a while.” There’s a trick to sticking to this mantra without falling back on the drill sergeant or shamer voice, says Wignall. When a slip-up happens, treat yourself like you would a good friend. “You would probably acknowledge the miss but be largely encouraging and supportive — certainly not judgmental and critical,” he says.

What all of these tips have in common is that they require little changes, not perfection. But their collective payoff is major: You go from swearing this is the year healthy will happen to actually living it.