You know how it goes: you set a goal, you start strong, and in two months, you stop. The initial burst of energy settles into complacency, and before you know it, you’re back to doing the status quo. What went wrong, you ask yourself? You really wanted to achieve (fill in the blanks), but you just lost steam by February.

New Year’s resolutions can set the goal maker up for failure. According to one New York Times article, four out of 5 people who create new years resolutions will end up breaking them. The article referenced a poll by time management firm Franklin Covey: will break the resolutions because they say they have too many other things to do, while 33% of respondents say they’re just not committed to the goal.

Maximizing your New Year’s resolutions means doing this year what didn’t work last year. According to experts, the real problem with making New Year’s resolutions is that people make the wrong resolutions. What people lack is a specific goal, instead of just a general desire to change.

Here’s some suggestions to help keep you on track when you set out to achieve your New Year’s resolutions:

1. Start small: don’t bite off more than you can chew. If you start small, and work incrementally, you’ll have more success in working towards achieving your goal.
2. Hammer out a specific goal: saving money and losing weight are nice things, but what does that really look like in the real world? The more specific that you can get in creating your resolution, the more focused you’ll become. it’s really difficult to just have general desires without that focus, because it’s that focus that burns that image in our minds. The clearer that image is, the easier time it will be for you to move forward towards it.
3. It’s all in the details: instead of toward some general sense of “weight loss,” “quitting smoking” or “saving more money.” if you could hammer out a specific goal, say “I’ll save $50 a week in a special savings account, and will have it transferred automatically each Friday,” that dramatically increase your chances of conquering it.
4. Be realistic: you should plan for them, because they can, and will, happen. You may have the best intentions of getting to the gym at 6:00 AM, but realistically, there are going to be mornings were you just don’t feel it getting up to do it. If you leave room for the very real possibility that you might not work towards your goal on certain days, don’t fret, but keep going.
5. The long haul: If you can keep going and build endurance towards achieving your goal, even through the thick and thin, your strengthening your ability to see through to the completion of your goal. If you can’t see your goal in the long-term, it makes it harder to work towards it in the present. Getting comfortable with working towards your goal in the long haul will make achieving it that much sweeter. If you can develop a relationship with your goal, instead of trying to blindly master it and achieve it in a fixed amount of time, it can make it much easier for you to pace yourself.
6. Get support: whether it’s friend or family, or your dog, at the support you need to be able to achieve your goal. Do you need new gym equipment or outfits? Do need to schedule appointment with a financial planner? Are there other resources, including time, money, mental energy, that you need to get or summon up? Any good athlete prepares vigorously for competition, and goalsetting is kind of similar. You want to be able to have what you need and know the lay of the land to be able to compete with yourself. Get the support you need, and your journey towards goal resolution will have more of a chance of success. Also, support yourself, because too often, it’s hard for us to give ourselves a pat on the back.
7. Track your progress: whether you like to journal, give yourself gold stars, or use a smart phone app, track your progress and get an idea of where you are at through the course of your goal. It’s important to get a sense of where you’re at, where you’re going, and where you came from. If you can see what you’ve already accomplished, this can be gratifying and can inspire you to keep going. Numbers always help, and guys like tracking numbers, so find a cool app and get going.

New Year’s resolutions don’t have to be thrown by the wayside by February. If you truly value something, and want to see it appear as a change in your life, you can have it. If you want it bad enough, you can have it. Try to follow some of these steps to help support you in your journey, and see your goal become reality sooner than you think.

For men, it’s difficult to work up the courage to do a lot of things in life: asking women out on dates, asking for a raise, or asking for what they need and want in general. Guys struggle a lot with self-confidence issues, and working up the courage to confront fear or fearful situations goes along with developing one’s self-confidence.

There’s a lot to be fearful of in the world, and when we succumb to our fear, we’re usually succumbing to negative experiences that we’ve had in the past. When we tried something and failed, or it hasn’t produced the result that we would’ve wanted, that experience gets branded in our psyches and cripples us from moving forward. Instead of being able to work up the courage to get to our final destination, whether that be getting out of a bad job or working up the courage to ask out the woman you’ve had your eye on, we succumbed to the overwhelming negative messages and beliefs that prevent us from our success.

The idea of “feel the fear and do it anyway” is popular in some circles, but the fear that debilitates us from summoning up the strength to deal with a situation with courage takes a keener eye to see. If we can look inside of ourselves, and investigate the fear ourselves, we can begin to dissolve the fear at its root. Instead of the male friendly way of “pushing through the fear,” which is one way to go, we turn in words and tried to develop our relationship with fear at its root. This way, if situations arise in the future that provoke our fear, we don’t have to get into a habit of just “pushing through it” to create a positive result.

Courage is the modus operandi of good self-confidence. We use courage to propel us into success in our lives. If there are blocks to our self-confidence, it may be that we are stuck in some kind of fear or negative self messages or beliefs that keep us in place. Here are some tips to help you work up the courage to situation that seems difficult:

• Ask yourself, “what is the worst possible outcome if I act on my fear? If I succumb to it?”
• help yourself understand if there have been situations in the past that have scarred you or hinder your ability to be courageous today.
• Try to identify if there are negative self messages that have come from your family background that keep you from using encourage. Oftentimes, we integrate family messages around fear, risk taking, and success.
• When you think of a situation that requires employing courage, what feelings come up for you? Try to check in physically with your body, and with the sensations that arise when you think of the fearful situation that would need your courage. What is the felt sense that you experience–in your heart, in your shoulders, in your neck, etc.?
• Try not to beat yourself into submitting to the potentially scarier risky event, because you’ll just make it worse. Instead, try to understand what is holding you back instead of trying to just “push through” the situation.

Try to use some of these tips to help you get through a situation that might need your courage. Oftentimes, because were stuck in our own fear and irrational fantasies and beliefs about how a situation is going to play out, we lose the sense of ourselves in the present moment. Because we’ve already shut down the outcome before we even started it, we deny ourselves a chance at success before we’re even out of the gates.

There’s a big difference between being stuck in a rut, and being depressed. The latter is chronic, the former is temporary. We all get stuck in ruts from time to time. We can’t always bring our ‘A’ game to everything we do. Our biorhythms, our lives, our minds: everything is cyclical. One day we’re flying, and another day feeling a little unmotivated and sluggish.

Popular culture professes to have many instant cures for feeling stuck in a rut, and this blog post is not one of them. Let’s talk a little more about what being in a rut might mean:

• You simply don’t want to do whatever it is, say go to work, take care of yourself, stop drinking, etc.
• Some outside entity forces you to change: girlfriend, paying your mortgage, getting to work to pay that mortgage
• We lack the creative “spark” or energy to invest in whatever task or activity we will do – we’re simply not inspired
• There’s a “should” or “must” attached to it; rule number one about humans is that we create an opposite reaction to forces telling us what to do. The energy is there – it’s just pent up and going the opposite direction. If we “have to do something,” it’s more likely we’ll drag our feet, or simply not do it altogether.
• We’re not in touch with what flows, or what’s fun. Our sense of play has diminished, and our sense of obligation overrides what we really want to do.

Here’s some ways to remedy that sense of being stuck in a rut.

• Start communicating with yourself. Ask pertinent questions like, “Why am I wanting to do this? What do I get out of doing it? What would I rather be doing, and could I be doing it that way?”
• Try not to “push” yourself through to the other side, and make yourself unstuck. This tends to create a behavioral pattern over time, which encourages chronic “stuckness” over the long term.
• Take time out, and brainstorm your values. If you don’t know what your values are, take some time to come up with them. Write down values like, “exercise” or “personal time” or “time with my family/wife/girlfriend”. Try create ones like “creative time” or “do-nothing on purpose time”. When you get to the root of what you’re about – your values – and you’re doing activities that align with those personal values, you help yourself de-rut.
• Identify the areas where you’re stuck, such as relationship, work, personal life, money, mind. Create an action plan to work towards solutions to address those specific area. Watch for overwhelming yourself by thinking in a ‘black or white’ mentality, and lumping everything together as a problem. You’ll overload yourself, and stay stuck. Maybe this is what got you into the rut in the first place.

Activating ourselves from the inside is most important, because others – whether they be our wives, girlfriends, bosses, or personal trainers – can only motivate us from the outside so much. Taking ownership for our situation, and making a commitment to ourselves to change is tough, but ultimately much more rewarding.