Every year we make New Years Resolutions and every year by the end January we fail to keep up with them. For your New Years Resolutions to work you need to develop healthy habits, positive thoughts and improve your self-confidence.

Self-confidence is the key to making other NY Resolutions stick.

With great self-confidence, we will believe that we can achieve our goals whether that’s to stop smoking, lose weight, find a new job or run a marathon. Therefore before you set yourself a challenge that could easily result in a relapse, let’s look at improving your self-confidence first.

Relapsing is when your brain defaults to what you do normally – habits and behaviours – and says “oh well, never mind”. Unfortunately, setbacks like this can result in negative feelings and depression. So instead of setting ourselves up for a fall, if we address those deep rooted behaviours and habits first we can build our self-confidence and increase our chances of success.

Self-Confidence Will Help You Achieve Your NY Resolutions

Creating new behaviours and habits to substitute the old ways of thinking will help you take control of your New Years Resolutions.


If you want to explore a therapy to help you boost your self-confidence, hypnotherapy for confidence is a highly effective way to change negative habits and behaviours and thereby increase your chances of achieving all kinds of goals and resolutions.


Here are some self-reflective tips that can give your self-confidence a boost and help you understand how you can succeed with your new year’s goals. Write down your answers on a piece of paper:

  1. What were your best achievements, personal successes or breakthroughs in the last year? Did you step up or into a new opportunity, try something you never tried before that make you fearful or uncomfortable?
  2. What were the challenges you had to overcome? How did you conquer the fear of failure, get up when you got knocked down, overcome the setbacks and find the strength to speak and fight even though you were scared?
  3. Where did you find your supportive network, people that influenced your methods, your motivation and how did you move forward? Where and who do you find your inspiration from and did you use this motivation to clear your space to focus on your goals?

Your brain has a way to re-inventing itself and those positive habits and behaviours you wrote down above can become the default response when you meet other challenges. Instead of relapsing into old habits and behaviours you can have the power and control!

Here are 7 steps for changing the way you think:

  1. Focus your thoughts on being positive – an important aspect of starting the new year with and finding success with your goals
  2. Make a plan and take small steps to work through each task or activity. If you try to tackle your goal as one big project you are more likely to feel stressed and relapse into old habits.
  3. Don’t associate yourself with negative people on social media or elsewhere. Also, list the negative beliefs you have and refute them and set some realistic beliefs about yourself. Being too judgmental about yourself will impede your progress.
  4. Set your goals in a SMART manner – Specific Measurable Achievable Realistic Time-based. Break these down into small steps or you will find that you lose your motivation. The way to achieve success is to take one baby step at a time.
  5. Combine your SMART goals with STRETCH goals (a big dream goal) that mean you are dreaming big and going after your ULTIMATE goals. Both these together are called the WISE goals which are grounded in what steps you are going to take next to achieve success.
  6. Avoid thinking like a perfectionist. We can always do better but a healthier way of thinking is doing our best or ‘just good enough’. Focus on the positive. If we fall short of doing what we want and fail at our aspirations, it’s easy to fall into the negative spiral of thinking. So a healthier method would be to take baby steps and have a realistic / ‘good enough’ approach.
  7. Don’t wait for things to happen or come to you. Learn something new each day and challenge yourself.

By focusing on actionable SMART goals and measuring them with the success you have achieved you will create a positive focus and a feedback loop. This will help motivate you to take the actionable steps week by week and create habits and behaviours long-term.

You will feel motivated, positive as you complete each step, and this will boost your confidence and self-esteem.

Understanding yourself will minimise your weaknesses and strengthen your resolve to stay focused and driven to daily enjoy your accomplishments. Finding a mentor or a therapist to help you to stay motivated, goal focused and on track can also improve your confidence and wellbeing.

An important thing to remember is to be patient with yourself, self-confidence and esteem is a step by step process and practice.

To find out more about hypnotherapy for confidence visit this page.