New Year's Resolutions: 5 expert tips to achieve your 2014 goals the easy way

Be healthier, go to the theatre, read more books, and just generally be a better person. Sound similar to your list of New Year's Resolutions?

It might be easy to identify what we want to be in 2014, but sticking to the path to acheiving our goals is a true test for our willpower and most of us fall off the wagon by February.

But instead of accepting failure this year, therapist Rob Kelly, who created the Thrive Programme, has five top tips to keep you on track.

1. Start accepting yourself
It's important to think of ways you can make positive changes in your life. It's easy to get very caught up in thinking about your perceived imperfections and problems but that's unhelpful because it decreases self-esteem and contributes to feelings of helplessness.

This New Year, as well as making your resolutions, set aside some time to reflect on 10 positive things about yourself, regardless of how small. This will help you to build self-esteem and a sense of power and enable you to feel more empowered in relation to achieving your goals.

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2. Set attainable goals   
It would, for example, be rather unrealistic to state that you are going are going to run a marathon next month when you currently struggle to walk a mile.  Rather than making rash, drunken promises, think about this year’s resolutions in advance. This way, you will be able to (soberly!) think about the kind of goals that are actually attainable.

What are reasonable expectationsof yourself? Don’t be pessimistic about your ability to achieve things, but think carefully about whether or not what you are asking of yourself is realistic. You can set yourself challenging goals BUT these goals should ultimately be achievable if you put in determined effort.

3. Start believing that you are in control
Just making a resolution isn't enough to make it happen. Many people approach their New Year’s resolutions in a powerless way, expecting magical positive changes, without really considering their role in achieving them. Unsurprisingly, this is a pretty likely route to failure.

Realise that you are in control of whether or not you are successful in your goals; your successes come about as a result of your efforts and skills. So, keep reminding yourself that it is down to your whether or not you achieve your resolutions this year.

4. Take steps to achieve your resolutions
And following on from that, you need to to take action! What small steps do you need to take in order to accomplish your resolutions? Your goal may be to lose a stone over the course of the year. But a whole year is a quite long way away. So, to keep yourself motivated and to ensure you are taking the steps to achieve this goal, you should set yourself smaller short-term targets. For example, you might decide that you are going to go for a run twice a week, or aim to lose 2lbs a month.

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5. Recognise your achievements
Make sure you say well done to yourself for the efforts you are putting into achieving your goals and realise that it is this hard work that will lead to success. Whenever you achieve a goal (or a step along the way), praise yourself for your accomplishment.

Additionally, rather than just thinking about what you have achieved, what you have learned along the way is really important – often more important than the actual outcome – since it is these skills that will enable you to thrive in life.

The Thrive Programme is a new and unique psychological programme, which helps people with a number of different problems including, motivation, negative thinking, addictions, confidence, phobias and a variety of other health and social conditions. Rob can be found on Twitter and his workbook, Thrive - the Changing Limiting Beliefs workbook: Health, Happiness and Success is out now.