Resolutions or Goals???

It's that time of the year again, the very last day when you look back at what you've accomplished and things you wish you'd been able to finish. Every New Year's Eve we make resolutions to do certain things, like lose weight (hahaha) take classes in whatever interests us, get rid of stuff that's been accumulating over the last year, read that book you've waited so long to get your hot little hands on.

Have you ever considered the difference between a resolution and a goal? According to my Oxford Word Finder (which is a combination dictionary/thesaurus I can't live without) I found the following meanings:

resolution - a thing resolved on; an intention

goal - the object of a person's ambition or effort

It might seem like a small thing but those words aren't really interchangeable and maybe we should give them another look. Maybe this is why so many of us see our resolutions fall to the wayside a few weeks into the new year. We intend to do certain things but lose interest in getting them done, or something derails our good intentions because there's no incentive to stick with it.

Now when you set a goal, you have something tangible to work toward, a specific result. It's something you can see...maybe not literally but you assign a certain importance to it and you're more apt to work hard to reach it. And unlike resolutions, you feel badly when you fall short of a goal. The nice thing about goals is they can be extended to finish what you started. It's difficult to extend an intention.

Consider this...when you play sports your goal is to score points. If you don't score points, you don't win, you don't reach your goal. Every point is a step closer to achieving your goal. Good intentions (resolutions) won't get you very far.

Some three years ago, I made it a point to set goals rather than resolutions for the new year. Every year I've managed to reach every goal but one. It's the same one each year but I still keep it in sight and work toward it. That goal is to find an agent. So far, the writing I've accomplished and submitted hasn't been long enough to meet an agent's expectations but I keep working at it. If I had resolved to work on it, I don't think I would have got very far. At the end of each year I've been able to look back and feel some satisfaction with my accomplishments of the last twelve months. As to the goal of finding an agent one day? I'm still working on it.

Keep in mind...when you resolve to do something, you're looking for solutions. When you set a goal you know there's hard work ahead of you with little/nothing to lose and much to gain. The gain isn't just in seeing something done, but also works for personal growth.

So will it be resolutions or goals? Best wishes for your choices in the coming year.