How Can Therapy Help You Reach Your New Year’s Resolution(s)?
Maybe you make New Year’s resolutions every year, yet you can’t remember the last time you stuck with them. Every year, you start out strong during the first week of January. Before you know it, the weekend rolls around, and your commitment starts to weaken. You find yourself slipping on your goals. By the time February arrives, you’ve all but forgotten about your resolution. You tell yourself that you can always try again next year. Yet the next year brings more of the same.
If you’re ready to finally accomplish your New Year’s resolution, you may want to consider turning to a therapist for support. A therapist can help you commit to your goals and hold you accoutable! Here are a few specific ways a therapist can assist you as you work towards your resolution.
Understand Your True Needs
What do you really need to accomplish in the New Year? Maybe you’ve always chosen a particular resolution just because your friends were working on the same goals, or because they seemed like something you “should” do.
Instead, a therapist can help you investigate your own unique desires and needs. What do you genuinely want to change about your life? What kind of changes would truly serve you? Your therapist can guide you as you hone in on the answers to these questions.
Let Go of Habits Holding You Back
Sometimes, fulfilling your New Year’s resolution doesn’t just mean picking up beneficial habits, it also means letting go of habits that have been hindering your progress in life. Your therapist can help you dig into the roots of these negative behavioral patterns.
They can also illustrate exactly how these habits have prevented you from reaching your full potential. Furthermore, your therapist will help you outline realistic methods for breaking these habits.
Outline Realistic Goals
Do you ever give up on resolutions because they’re simply too overwhelming? Maybe it feels like you don’t have enough time in your schedule to achieve certain major goals. Perhaps you try to take on several resolutions at once, and when you try to focus on all of them, you realize that you’ve spread yourself too thin. Sometimes, when we set goals that are too overwhelming, and we do not succeed we feel like we failed. As a result, we give up on the goal.
Your therapist will guide you towards resolutions that are realistic. Breaking up a big goal to smaller, achievable goals can help you in this process. That way, you’ll have a better chance of fulfilling them!
Gain Tools and Coping Mechanisms
How can you increase your chances of sticking to your resolution? Imagine you were going to build a house: you would need the right tools to get the job done. The same principles apply to goal setting. While in therapy, your therapist will work with you so that you can gain the tools you’ll need to achieve your goals. This could include methods like journaling, getting organized, time management, and more. They can also make sure that you mark your progress in a tangible way and allow yourself to celebrate milestones on your way to your primary goal.
Hold Yourself Accountable
When you’re working towards a resolution on your own, it can be easy to push it to the back burner. This is because no one is holding you accountable. However, if you’re working with a therapist, accountability will be a core component of the goal-setting process. They can help you come up with a clear system for documenting your progress. Chances are, you’ll feel more motivated to keep up with your commitments if you know that you’ll be talking to your therapist about your resolution on a weekly or monthly basis.
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Are you ready to achieve your big goals this year? Working with a therapist can help. Reach out to us today to discuss your options for scheduling your first session.
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