Instead of New Years Resolution, How About New Years Hopes?

Every New Year we may feel pressured to create a list of New Year’s resolutions. A problem with making resolutions can be found by looking at the statistics on how many people actually maintain them. According to a 2024 article in Forbes magazine entitled New Year’s Resolutions Statistics 2024 written by managing editor Sarah Davis, some resolutions were more common than others, with the most popular goals including improved fitness (48%), improved finances (38%), improved mental health (36%), weight loss (34%) and improved diet (32%).

The article then looked at how long the average New Year’s Resolution lasts.

Davis states that “failing at New Year’s resolutions is so common that there’s even a slew of (unofficial) dates commemorating such failures—some sources cite ‘Ditch New Year’s Resolutions Day’ as January 17 while others denote the second Friday in January as ‘Quitter’s Day.’”

“Forbes Health/One Poll survey found that the average resolution lasts just 3.74 months. Only 8% of respondents tend to stick with their goals for one month, while 22% last two months, 22% last three months and 13% last four months.” Clearly the vast majority of people are unable to sustain their intentions to stick with their resolutions.

Is there anything we can do? My suggestion for all of us: instead of making resolutions, we each make a list of what we hope will happen in our lives, in the lives of those we love, in our communities and in the world. Then we can think about ways to nurture those hopes, how we might pray for those in each category (those we love, our communities and even the whole world), when and how we might share our hopes for others as a way to show them how much we hope that their lives will be happy and healthy.  

Let’s start exploring this idea by defining hope. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, hope is “a confident feeling about what will happen in the future.”

While most people who make New Year’s Resolutions expect to stick firmly with them, I think hope is somehow kinder, with less pressure to consistently perform than resolutions are. Hope can be focused on less global categories than most resolutions focus on. I find resolving to achieve improved fitness, improved finances, improved mental health or weight loss to be very broad without much room to mess up. I can hope to be more organized while allowing myself a lot of leeway. I can congratulate myself when I make headway tidying up my desk, without a resolution pressuring me to be completely organized in all aspects of my life. 

I especially like focusing on having hope for others. Those popular resolutions Forbes shared are all self-focused. Being focused on caring about others, including taking action to be helpful in their lives, resonates with my belief that the world would be a better place for all of us if we focused on caring for what others might benefit from receiving.

In the New Year I hope that you can be kind to yourself, set fair goals focused on your hopes that don’t result in your feeling ashamed or like a failure. I also hope you can reach out to others in your world by communicating your hopes for them. I think these efforts can make a difference in many lives, including your own.  

Invitation for Reflection

1. What experiences have you had with making and keeping New Year’s resolutions? What impact have these experiences had on your self-esteem?
2. How might you feel about generating hopes for yourself, for others, for your community and even for the world instead of making New Year’s resolutions?  What hopes come to mind?
3. If you focus on New Year’s hopes, how might that impact your self-esteem?
4. How might it impact those for whom you share your hopes for them?

Diane Wagenhals

Director Emeritus, Lakeside Global Institute