How to nail a New Year’s resolution

Greetings, all. And happy 2023! Hope it’s been good so far. If you made a New Year’s resolution, how’s it going? I hope that question did not cause feelings of guilt or shame. However, know that if you’re struggling to keep your resolution, you’re in good company. Only about 9% of those who make New Year’s resolutions actually keep them, according to information compiled by Mick de Boer of InsideOutMastery.com. When it comes to the timeline for quitting, 23% quit by the end of the first week, 64% after the first month and 81% before the end of the second year.

Part of the low success rate could be a self-defeating attitude. Forty-three percent of people who set resolutions expect to give up on them by February. If you go into it expecting to fail, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. However, even for those with good intentions, it’s hard for them to follow through. Why? Well, according to de Boer, it has to do with timing.

“While people want to achieve change, they have yet to be ready to commit fully,” de Boer writes.

In other words, while yes, a new year is a “clean slate” and in that sense a great time to start something new, if a person hasn’t thought through the specific steps they will take and how they will fit a new habit such as exercise into their daily schedule, they are probably not going to be successful.

While New Year’s Day is a nice day to start a new habit, there’s nothing inherently magical about that day. Any day is a good day to start working toward a goal. Also, sometimes we set our goals too big and set ourselves up for failure. For example, wanting to read 25 books in a year may be an intimidating goal. But if that’s intimidating, a person could make a goal of reading two books in a month, see how that goes, adjust as necessary and work their way up to 25 books. An acronym I gleaned from my Girl Scout days, although I don’t know where it originally came from, is that goals should be SMART — Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely. If we can keep those parameters in mind, it will increase our likelihood of success.

Speaking of success, de Boer says successful individuals were likely to experience 14 slip-ups over a two-year time period, “indicating that resilience or the ability to bounce back from setbacks is essential for goal success.”

That statistic is encouraging because it shows that setbacks are a normal part of the process. So much of goal setting is a mental game. If we beat ourselves up mentally for our failures, it doesn’t help us change the future; all it does is lead to more self-doubt and discouragement.

So that’s another thing to keep in mind — if you mess up on the way to your goal, don’t sweat it. Just pick it back up the next day. We often associate success with never messing up, but that’s really not the case. The most successful people aren’t the ones who never mess up; they’re the ones who keep trying. They keep showing up.

Well, I didn’t really intend for that to turn into a motivational pep talk, but take it for what it’s worth, I guess. And now for a random story.

So, I’ve always liked the look of polished fingernails but very rarely paint my nails because I always manage to smudge them before they are completely dry, or the polish starts chipping off in like two days. So last year when I saw a couple of acquaintances on Facebook praising the merits of a certain glue-on nail brand that looks just like a salon manicure, I was intrigued. My mom bought me a few sets of the nails as an early Christmas present, I think.

Anyway, I tried one set right after I got them and for the most part liked them. Then I promptly forgot about the three other nail kits for most of last year.

Well anyway, last Thursday night I decided to take the time to try these nails again. I picked out the fake nails that would fit my actual nails and even watched a YouTube video for the proper application process. I applied the nails at a 45-degree angle as the nice lady in the video indicated. I used a “pearl-sized” dot of glue as the box recommended for the longestlasting nail wear. The first few nails went fine but I should have known I was going to have problems when I was applying a nail and some of the glue snuck out the side and onto my fingertip. Then, I accidentally got glue on top of another nail, creating a white smear across the glossy pink surface. I filed the glue off and got it looking OK, but have determined that being a nail technician is not my calling in life. So you can imagine my increased frustration the next day when I was sitting at my desk, not doing anything with my left hand, and all of a sudden I felt a faint flutter and saw that one of my new nails had fallen off. This was after the package promised at least a week of wear time. To my dismay, the next day I lost my thumb nail somewhere in transit. I just looked down and it was gone. The next afternoon I was making lasagna. I went to pry up the pull tab for a can of mushrooms with my index finger— in hindsight, not my smartest move, I should have used a knife — and sure enough, the nail popped right off. I also lost my other thumb nail in the exchange.

The following day, I was running my fingers through my hair when I felt an alltoo- familiar sensation. Sure enough, the opposite middle finger’s fake nail had fallen off. At that point, I was questioning my sanity in continuing to glue these nails on. But, it was a different nail that fell off each time, so the re-gluing seemed to be effective, and I figured it would be less work to glue one nail back on versus soaking all my nails, prying the fake nails off and filing off the remaining glue so they looked somewhat presentable. So, I decided to just glue it back on and hope for the best. Well, as of Tuesday afternoon, I have not had any more nail mishaps, but I’m not holding my breath.

So anyway, that was a rather long story to be able to write this, but may your New Year’s goals stick much better than my glueon nails did!

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