How to create a goal and stick with it.

Well it's that time of year. The ritual of setting our New Year's resolution. We all view the New Year as a "fresh start" to try to give us that boost to get back to something important to us, something we value. That can be anything from losing weight, to eating healthier, to exercising regularly, to making better financial choices, or quitting smoking, or even spending more time with our loved ones.

Here are six things you can do to help you to make and stick to your New Year's resolution.

Step 1. Make your goals / resolutions outcomes not activities. This outcome is your vision statement if you will. It's a set of words that describe some future state. It's the "why".

Step 2. Make that goals / resolution measurable. Set a specific but attainable goal that you can use to measure progress to you attaining your resolution.

Step 3. Think of the things (activities) you can do that contribute to you achieving your overall resolution goal and also set goals for these activities as well.

Step 4. Measure your progress toward these activity goals every day or whatever frequency you set that makes sense for your activity and overall resolution goals.

Step 5. If you find that you are not on track in step 4, then you must do something different. If you need to get back on track, try to figure out what caused you to go off track in the first place. The idea is to find the reason you went off track and find a solution to not having that happen again. Learn from your mistakes and put corrective action in place so you don't make the same mistake again.

Step 6. Celebrate small wins. Every year we go through this ritual of resolution setting.

One parting thought is not to think about this as a yearly "event", but think about this more as a lifestyle change. If you "fail", then don't quit and wait till next year. Pick up where you left off, maybe reset to a new goal, and keep going. This could be all the difference between a lifetime success or failure.

Changing something about yourself is all about visualizing a positive outcome that you can continually focus on - the why - this helps with keeping your desire to keep doing the contributing activities. It's about setting daily or appropriate attainable goals that you can measure, and then a process to make sure you know if you are on track of not and if not, a commitment to resolve the thing that caused you to go off track. Celebrate your successes and progress along the way.

It's not just the end goal that matters, but also how you take that journey along the way.