As the year rolls around so do the resolutions. It’s a new year so why not create a new you! Or at least use the opportunity to restructure your life to include healthier habits and routines. Whether it’s diet changes, exercise habits or defining personal goals the New Year is an opportunity to take your life in an impactful direction. However, often times goals can seem insurmountable and what starts out as hopeful ambition soon gets buried in disappointment as those goals fall short of expectation. To combat the post New Years Blues, we’ve assembled Five Golden Tips for keeping your New Years Resolutions on track for the entire year.

#1 Write Goals Out

Study after study have concluded that the process of physically transcribing your goals helps you bring them within reach. The act of writing these goals out makes them obtainable. There’s also an organizational component to writing that helps you prioritize which goal to follow when.

#2 Be Specific

Part of the challenge of creating goals is holding ourselves accountable for their specificity. While it’s important to have big goals, often if the goal is too large or ambitious it can quickly disempower. That’s why it’s important to have a balance between realistic expectations and a best of both worlds outcome. Organize it like this: set for yourself an overall objective you’d like to achieve, don’t allow any limitations for how big or difficult this goal may be. Once you’ve established what you’d like to achieve, write out sub-goals under your objective that are reachable, obtainable, and can act as rewarding milestones for where you ultimately want to go. Often our goals can be daunting, but by breaking them up into bite-sized pieces we create a realistic path for success.

 #3 Reward Yourself

I can’t talk about this enough. Yes, the goal within itself is a reward but sometimes the road to get there is long and tiresome. To stay motivated, reward and celebrate your victories. Share them with friends, treat yourself to things you enjoy, incentive the journey to success because you’re worth it! Change is difficult and sometimes it’s hard to see the bigger picture our changes are contributing to when you’re in the thick of it.

#4 Avoid Making Goals an Obligation

For some people high demands yield high success. But for most of us, forcing ourselves into following an obligation is not likely to sustain success. Things happen, we change. Sometimes life throws us curveballs and some days are more strenuous than others. If you encounter difficulty in your journey to goal making it’s okay to make modifications to accommodate wherever life takes you. That’s why it’s important to outline a roadmap for yourself ahead of time! Make sure your goals remain enjoyable, feasible and adaptable to the circumstances of where you are.

#5 Build a Team of Support Either with Yourself or Your Community

Whether you’re working on your goals independently or as a part of a group, company, or organization, it’s important to establish a system of support. Keep goals in conversation; share your success (or even better your challenges!) with the community of people around you. Maybe it’s a list of your great achievements or a guidepost of lessons learned, sometimes it helps to inform your friends and loved ones of where you’re at. If you’d rather keep to yourself, invest in a journal! Sometimes we can persuade ourselves into thinking that in our times of success we weren’t without our challenges. It’s easy to confuse the present obstacles as never being around during our periods of success, but by keeping a journal you remember that the whole journey to change is a process.

It’s an exciting time of year and an excellent opportunity to discover new colors of ourselves. Stay on top of your goals and you’ll unlock access to a part of life you once thought hidden. The process of change might have it’s bumps, but the pay off in the end is well worth the challenges.