The continuing adventures of 31 Days of Goal Setting! Yesterday, we thought about our 2015 New Year’s Resolutions and why we set them. Today, we ask: How did you do with your NYRs? Why do you think you failed or succeeded?

Once again, the what is important but the why is equally essential. Try to be as honest as possible about the reasons for your success or failure.

Get through Rosetta Stone – I didn’t do a good job at this. At all. I basically abandoned Rosetta Stone in mid-February and didn’t look back.

Why? Often these types of goals fail because the goal-setter didn’t adequately plan how they would do the work. That’s not the case for me – I had a clear plan of which days of the week I would work on Rosetta Stone after work, how much time I would spend on it, etc.

It came down to two things for me. First, I was frustrated with the Rosetta Stone software; it tends to teach vocabulary by using the same phrases or sentences with the same matching images, meaning I felt like I was memorizing sentence/picture combos more than memorizing the actual vocabulary.

Maybe more importantly, I wasn’t actually re-learning Chinese to use it in any particular way or because it was innately important to me. I wasn’t encountering Chinese anyplace else in my life, nor was I planning on using it practically at some defined future point. It became really easy to “forget” to do it, because, well, what’s the point?

Get balance of car loan to $1200 or less – Yup! I actually went above and beyond; my car loan is completely paid off.

Why? On one hand, I don’t want to take a lot of credit for this because I am quite secure financially. This wasn’t a huge struggle for me to achieve. On the other hand, I could have continued to pay the minimum amount each month. I chose to make this goal a priority and got it done because I really dislike debt, and I had other goals (savings, etc.) that I wanted to achieve with that money.

Go to the gym four or five times a week – I did pretty well on this. I haven’t kept super detailed records on my gym attendance and I suspect my average (between occasional illness/trips out of town/general malaise) is probably closer to 3.5 times per week, but I am still counting this as a basic win.

Why? I’ve set things up to make it as easy as possible to exercise. My gym is literally across the street from my office building. Also, my health insurance gives me a small but nice bonus for completing recorded workouts. And I really do enjoy the endorphin rush of a good workout. I think my likelihood of going to the gym also improved later on in the year – but I’ll be talking a bit more about that in the next few days.

As I look at my successes and failures and consider my reasons for each one, I begin to see a pretty clear pattern. How about you? Keep those in the back of your head as we continue to analyze our previous goals.