Happy New Year, #OzoSquad!! Whether 2018 proved to be your best year yet or your motivation to make 2019 way better, all of us here at Ozobot HQ hope you’ve had wonderful holidays with loved ones.
As we move into January, Evo has a New Year’s wish for you too: that you can shift the mindset around “resolutions are made to be broken.” Instead, Evo wants to help us keep our resolutions and make 2019 the year that we each become heroes of our own life stories!
For New Year’s Resolutions week beginning today, first check out the goals our own Evo has chosen to set for 2019, then some ways everyone can get more strategic about making, and not breaking, those pesky resolutions.
Evo’s New Year’s Resolutions:
- Live life colorfully
- Think outside the lines
- Try tidying up
- Create and inspire in the classroom every day!
We love Evo’s resolutions, now here are four tips for keeping them!
1. Spend an Hour or Two Vision Boarding
Light a fire or some candles, snuggle up with a cozy blanket, and put away phones and other distractions for a little while. Close your eyes and envision what you’d like your best life to look like by the end of 2019. Next, gather up some magazines, polaroid pictures, and other scrap paper to make an old school collage. Collect images that embody the feelings, desires, and motivations around your goals for 2019.
Consider getting friends together on Saturday, January 12, National Vision Board Day, and provide supplies for making your vision boards together! Once complete, hang your board somewhere where you’ll see it and be inspired by it each morning.
2. Complete a Goal-Planning Worksheet Session (with SMART Goals)
Now that you have an idea from vision boarding what you’d like to aspire to, think about what you’d like to improve upon or change in order to get there. If you have a bad habit you’d like to quit, Charles Duhigg suggests to break habits down into their cue, routine, and reward loop to change things up.
For example, if you spend far too much time scrolling through Instagram each day, the cue may be that you feel lonely or bored, your routine may be opening the app and endlessly swiping and tapping, and your reward is feeling soothed and connected through that repetitive behavior. Your goal could be to change this behavior and, instead of heading to Instagram, to call or text a friend to catch up or chat with a colleague in person once or twice each day.
Set a yearly goal, then break it down to monthly pieces, then finally something you can do each day to work towards it. For the above example, you could set a max number of hours per week that you’d ultimately like to spend on Instagram, and slowly decrease that amount over the course of a few months, while you increase the number of conversations you instigate with family and friends.
3. Discover Daily Journaling
Morning Pages, Bullet Journaling, Gratitude Journal – oh my! However you decide to do it, daily journaling can prove to be the best way to stay on track with where your head’s at, and how you can shift focus to aligning it with where you want your year to go.
4. Collaborate with an Accountability Buddy
Having a solid support system is the number one predictor of happiness and success in life. Tell your designated accountability buddy your goals, and set a regular checkpoint during each week to give progress updates. Don’t sweat the small stuff (we all make mistakes) and don’t get discouraged by your struggles (news flash, we all have them). Instead, share them with a friend and learn from stumbles together. This works even if you’re just sharing your goals and updates with Evo!
Whether you decide to apply all four of the tips above or just go with one, let’s all make a commitment to lift each other up in 2019. Keeping resolutions for longer than a couple weeks into January is no small feat, but we have the best shot when we think positively and rally around like-minded friends.
