If you find it difficult to stick to your New Year’s resolutions, try making your pet your accountability-buddy and create healthy resolutions that you can share. By setting your intentions with your pet, you will likely feel more committed to your goals for the whole year.

While simply stating your New Year’s resolutions is helpful, being more specific about exactly how you will accomplish your goals will contribute to your success even more. James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, emphasises that when trying to cement a new habit, planning when and where you will perform your new desired behaviours contributes to success significantly. So, when making your resolutions, try to map out exactly how these new habits will fit into your day-to-day life. Here are some ideas for figuring out some ideal resolutions for yourself and your pet!

What worked last year?

When planning your New Year’s resolutions with your pet, consider what worked well last year. For example, were you able to spend a lot of time outside in nature with your pet or create a more relaxing environment in your home? Did you prioritize a healthy diet for yourself and your pet? Remember the small successes as well as any roadblocks that stopped you from achieving your goals as well as you would have liked.

After taking stock of what you were able to accomplish last year, consider if your goals are still valid. When you consider them, is it clear that they are going to bring tangible value to your life or to the life of your pet? Sometimes it can be useful to write down our goals and update them based on where we are in our life; often we have outdated goals swimming around in our heads that are not very important to us anymore.

What do you have time for?

Once you’ve considered what you really want for yourself and your pet in the new year, consider if what you’ve written down can reasonably fit into a 24-hour day. For example, if your goal is to get 15,000 steps a day with your dog, consider how that will fit in with your work, family and other commitments. While a goal like this might look good on paper, it may be better to downsize your resolution slightly in order to be certain you can achieve it and then slowly increase your goal over time once you’ve mastered the smaller goal. While of course we all want to do as much as we can and achieve lofty goals, if you can’t practically implement a resolution into your life because it is just too ambitious, you will end up frustrated and that may make you give up on your goals all together.

How will you make the habit stick?

So how do you make these new, reasonable goals stick in the new year? The trick is specificity. If your goal is to walk with your dog every day, don’t leave it at that, make it more specific. Say “I will go for a walk every day with my dog at 6:00 p.m. in the park”. By adding these specific details, you are putting the resolution on autopilot. You don’t have to brood over when you’ll go for the walk or where you will go, you can just follow the recipe that you’ve made for yourself. James Clear presents this strategy in the form of a fill-in-the-blank sentence, which you might find helpful:

I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].

Setting up all of your resolutions like this will give you a better chance of meeting your goals. By being more specific about what you want to achieve, you will be able to automate your desired actions and easily incorporate them into your day-to-day life.

What are your New Year’s resolutions with your pet? Share them with us on Twitter or Instagram!