The question for the first day of my little homegrown 31 Days of Goal Setting is: What New Year’s Resolutions did you set for 2015 and why?  

The “and why” is a REALLY CRITICAL part of this exercise. A significant chunk of this month is dedicated to figuring out what is important to you. For one thing, when you set a goal to achieve something that you care about, you are more likely to be motivated to achieve it. For another, why bother making goals about things you don’t care about?

Be as exact and descriptive as possible here. Did you write down your New Year’s Resolutions for 2015? (I did, but I am sort of a weirdo when it comes to goals. See also: this entire series of exercises.) Any diary/Facebook/other social media entries about your NYRs? Try to dig them up.

I had twelve New Year’s Resolutions for 2015. I’m going to talk about three of them.

Get through Rosetta Stone – more specifically, get through as much as possible of the Mandarin Chinese Rosetta Stone program that I purchased back in 2014 in order to relearn Chinese.

Why? It’s a little complicated. I minored in Chinese in college but never use it anymore, meaning I’ve basically forgot it. I feel really guilty about that. There’s also cachet in being someone who can speak a second language, and I like to think of myself as an educated person who might be able to speak multiple languages. In addition, even though it’s been years since I’ve been in a formal educational environment, I find learning and educational goals with defined timeframes, learning achievements, and structure, very satisfying.

Get balance of car loan to $1200 or less – this one is pretty self-explanatory.

Why? From my upbringing as well as personal preference, debt makes me profoundly uncomfortable and I like having savings. I also wanted to pay down my car loan as quickly as possible because my interest rate was fairly high. Paying the loan off more quickly meant less interest payments, which meant I could start saving more money more quickly.

Go to the gym four or five times a week – people will quibble, but I’d actually call this less of a goal in and of itself, and more of a behavioral plan towards a goal. But I wrote it down as one of my NYRs, so up it goes.

Why? I really like working out in a gym setting – it’s stress-busting and satisfying – but I sometimes forget or start to feel like it’s too much bother; I wanted to make sure it remained a priority. I also was pursuing health and fitness goals: to get stronger and to improve my aerobic endurance, and to maintain/improve my metabolic “numbers”.

Tomorrow we’ll look at how we did on our 2015 NYRs. Bonus question: Based on my reasons above, any guesses on how I did on the listed goals?