As 2025 yawns one last time before rolling onto its mountainous side to make room for 2026, many of us feel the electric hum of possibility. 2026 stretches before us, wide and completely empty—a slate for whatever version of ourselves we may awaken in the New Year.

But for many of us, our excitement around new possibilities, habits, and successes comes chained to a familiar anxiety. We know, deep down, that our New Year’s resolutions often get tossed, forgotten, or lost before the last spring frost melts. And yet, year after year, we tell ourselves that everything will change: this year, we will finally seize hold of the life we want.

Over 4,000 years ago, Ancient Babylonians celebrated Akitu, making pledges to their deities that they would return borrowed items or pay off debts. Romans honored Janus, the god of beginnings, by making promises for good conduct at the start of the year. Medieval Knights renewed chivalric oaths through the “Voeux du Paon” (Vow of the Peacock), swearing to uphold their knightly virtues.

And today? Today, we make vows to ourselves: we’re going to eat healthy, exercise more, spend less time on social media, spend more time with friends and family, spend less money, et cetera. I’m sure some of us might even vow that we’re going to return our neighbors farming equipment, although this is likely a less common New Year’s resolution for today’s celebrators than it was for the Babylonians.

Despite our apprehension regarding our own ability to stick to our resolutions, and our anxiety about picking out the right ones, New Year’s Eve is a day of hope. (New Year’s Day, of course, is a day of hangovers.) And hope is an incredibly powerful and transformative emotion. It is, after all, the driving factor that allows us to reach our goals. And yet, regardless of all that hope, just nine percent of Americans actually stick to their New Years’ resolutions through the year.

Are you ready to be part of the nine percent?

There is no one secret to sticking to your New Year’s resolutions, but there are some powerful goal-setting strategies that can help make 2026 The Year of You:

1. Work Backwards

A lot of the goals people set for themselves during New Years come from imagining their ideal future self. If your ideal future self has rock hard abs and loves the taste of kale, maybe you’ll write something like “get healthy”, “get in shape”, or “start working out”. Those kinds of goals aren’t really goals at all—they’re the end result of achieving a goal.

Don’t get me wrong: By all means, keep picturing the version of you who eats kale for dessert. Future you can help serve as a guidepost for your goals and pathways to achieving them—but future you can’t be the goal itself.

So, write down your broader, more abstract goals. Then, work backwards. If your guidepost is to “get healthy”, break that down into sections. What does health mean to you? What are its different facets and components? What are the genres of habit that a healthy future you is practicing?

Maybe you broke it down into something like: nutrition, sleep, physical activity, and mental wellness. Now, brainstorm some goals for each section. What are some of your concerns regarding your nutrition, and some goals that might address these concerns? How might you improve your sleep? Your mental health?

Rather than ending up with the goal of “getting healthier” in 2026, you’ll end up with the pathway there—something like: “eat more whole foods”, “no screens for 1 hour before bed”, “75 minutes of Crossfit per week”, and “5-10 minutes of daily meditation”.

2. Make Them Smart Goals

Now that you have some tangible goals, you’ll want to dial them in even more by turning them into SMART goals: Specific, measurable, actionable, attainable, relevant, and time-based.

Specific: After working backwards, your goals should be way more specific, but take the time to see if they can get even more specific.

Rather than “eat more whole foods”, you could say: “eat more fruits and vegetables during lunch and dinner”.

Measurable: Make sure that your goals and progress are measurable. You won’t really know if you’re progressing on a goal unless it can be measured.

So, instead of “eating more fruits and vegetables during lunch and dinner”, maybe your goal is “I will eat at least 3 servings of whole fruits or vegetables at lunch and 2 servings at dinner”.

Attainable: Make sure that the goal is something you believe you can achieve. I’m not saying to dull your sparkle—pick goals that feel big and exciting, because that will help motivate you. Just don’t pick goals that you believe to be out of reach.

Relevant: Your goals should align with your values and long-term objectives. Goal-setting and brainstorming can be really exciting, and sometimes we can get a bit carried away with the possibilities. But, if you’re going to keep up the motivation and routine needed to consistently work towards a goal, you’ll want to ensure that it aligns with your big picture. Maybe that’s the “future you” (AKA your personal development objectives), but it could also be things like your education or career.

Time-based: Finally, you’ll want to assign a time to your goals. We’re often tempted to make New Year’s Resolutions for the entirety of the coming year, but for a lot of our SMART goals, it’s not just overwhelming—its impractical.

Most of us know that as our fitness progresses, our goals often change and grow. If your goal is to go to the gym every non-rest day for a whole year, you’ll lose out on a lot of flexibility to try new things and experiment with your fitness routine. If you limit that goal to 75 days (the average amount of time it takes to form a habit), it becomes much more achievable and real, and you can use your new habit as the foundation to build a fitness routine.

The same can be said for most goals. For instance, a goal of “5-10 minutes of daily meditation” may seem really achievable, but if we plan to meditate every day for all of 2026, it can immediately feel overwhelming.

Instead, you could do some research and find that most benefits of meditation start after 2 months. Maybe, instead, your goal could be “I will complete 10 minutes of meditation every morning for two months”.

At the end of the two months, you’ve completed your goal, and you can evaluate it. Do you want to stay the course for another two months? Do you want to increase the time or the frequency? Or maybe you want to use that time to journal, instead.

Shorter, purposeful timeframes allow us to reflect and adapt, and are a huge part of setting sustainable goals!

3. Write Them DOwn and Look at Them Every Day (Just Kidding…Sort of)

Now that you’ve come up with your SMART-er New Year’s Resolutions for 2026, choose about 2 to 5 goals to commit to and write them down. Research tells us that having your goals written down significantly increases your chances of achieving them. Likewise, publicly committing to a goal (which could be as simple as texting a friend) and creating a system of accountability (sending weekly progress reports to a friend) both increase your likelihood of achieving said goal.

Whether you keep your goals in a Google Doc, magnet-ed to the fridge, or hanging on your ceiling, make sure that you’re actually looking at your goals frequently. If you perform a weekly habit–like budgeting, journaling, or sitting down at your favorite coffee shop–incorporate looking over your goals and keeping track of your progress.

Ready, Set, Go!

As 2026 opens its eyes, it doesn’t ask you to become someone entirely new overnight. It asks only that you begin—intentionally, imperfectly, and with a little more structure than you had last year. The traditions of New Year’s resolutions have survived for thousands of years not because humans are especially good at keeping promises, but because we are endlessly hopeful. We believe, again and again, that change is possible. And that belief matters.

The difference between the resolutions that fade by February and the ones that quietly reshape a life isn’t willpower or moral strength—it’s clarity. When you work backwards, set SMART goals, limit your focus, and give yourself realistic timelines, you turn hope into something usable. You stop asking your future self to magically appear, and instead give your present self a path to follow.

So write the goals down. Revisit them. Adjust them when life inevitably intervenes. Let 2026 be less about grand declarations and more about small, repeatable actions that add up over time. You don’t need to be perfect to be part of the nine percent—you just need a plan, a little accountability, and the courage to keep showing up.

Is your New Year’s Resolution to be more overall fit, but you’ve got no idea where to get started? Resistance training, functional strength training, cardio, HIIT—there are more options than days in the week! No sweat (well, lots of sweat, but not over this). CFE is so popular because it means that you don’t have to choose. When you join CFE, you’ll get the benefits of all of the above, plus an amazing community and coaches here to support you.


No more excuses. Start working towards your New Year’s resolutions today: Sign Up for a Free Intro.