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Everyone makes new year’s resolutions to signify a new beginning of the year. Along the way, you may pick up new resolutions and drop some that aren’t promising. That’s perfectly normal.
If you have missed to start your resolutions on 1 Jan, the second best time is now. It is never too late unless you have given up hope.
In this article, let’s look at 2 aspects you can change to improve your life. Towards the end, we will bring you through the journey of change.
First thing first, benchmarking
Before you jump into any big idea for your new year’s resolutions, let’s do something called ‘Benchmarking’. It is like locating yourself in a map, so that wherever you move next, you are aware of your direction and you can track your improvement.
All you need to do here is to review your current status, be it physical health, financial health, career, relationship, spiritual, and so forth. For this exercise, let us focus on 2 important aspects particularly for ageing well, your health and financial. To do a benchmarking, all you need is to walk in a clinic for health screening and review your financial status either by yourself or engage a financial planner.
- Health screening
You can either go for basic or comprehensive health screening. Basic screening comprises of assessment on your health parameters such as height, weight, BMI, blood pressure, blood glucose, blood cholesterol levels, blood profile, etc. While comprehensive screening can include liver function, kidney function, hepatitis screen, ECG, cancer markers, urinalysis, stool analysis, etc.
- Financial review
Financial review isn’t simply how much money you have in your back account, social security, and investment. It also includes insurance coverage, and retirement planning.
Through assessing your current status, you can have better idea why you want to change, what you want to achieve, and how you want to improve, so that you do not fumble through your golden years.
Health is your top priority
Without good health, you will never have energy to achieve anything in life. In fact, poor health is definitely going to drain your savings and leave you hard time during old age. If you have identified areas of health you want to improve for your new year’s resolutions, be it losing weight, smoking cessation, or simply better health, you can basically start looking at it from 2 angles, i.e. diet and lifestyle modifications. Here are some options for your consideration.
- Diet modification
- Reduce sugar in your foods and drinks.
- Reduce salt in your foods.
- Cut down oily foods.
- Eat more vegetables in daily meals.
- Start Mediterranean diet.
- Avoid preserved and processed foods.
- Eat in moderation and start a balance diet.
- Drink more plain water for hydration.
Don’t neglect mental wellness
Apart from diet and lifestyle modification for this new year’s resolutions, mental well-being is becoming a major concern in recent years. A few suggestions you can consider:
- Create daily ‘me-time’ for yourself without interruptions from anyone.
- Get a hobby.
- Learn something new, offline or online.
- Manage stress.
- Start a healthy social life, make new friends.
- Start meditation.
Review your financial health
Strong financial health is as important as your physical health, both takes time to grow and accumulate. How much you have in your savings, investment, and social security depend a lot on how long have you started growing and nurturing it, it is not something you can change overnight.
However, an accident or any undesired life event can damage your health and wipe out your savings instantly. To prevent that from happening, you ought to have sufficient insurance protections for accident, hospitalisation, disability, and death. You can refer to some guidelines in our previous blog article here.
Once you are safeguarded from unforeseen life events, it is time for you to plan for retirement. Many people who do not have a proper plan misjudge their retirement needs and live miserably at old age. There are 3 things you need to figure out and here are the guidelines.
There are 2 other components that damage your finances actively (gamble) and passively (scam). Gambling is like taking poison at small dose. Over time, your appetite and risk tolerance will grow. Once you are addicted, it is hard for you to cut the ties. While for scam, it is an act that a scammer manipulates your greed, fear, and empathy to take your possessions. Previous blog articles have elaborated on these 2 topics extensively.
Change is a journey
Setting goals and changing habits are not just for new year’s resolutions, they are a life long journey. At some point of time, you may be feeling confused, lost, and unmotivated. Apart from making a S.M.A.R.T. goal, it is very important to set it right from the beginning, you can refer to the steps here.
- Identify your pain and pleasure.
Knowing what and why is it that you want to change are your very first step. Is it to get out of an unfulfilling life? or to achieve your desired state? Albert Einstein’s famous quote “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”. If you want to change, you must take actions and do things differently. - Benchmark your current state.
As mentioned above, benchmarking helps you to identify your current state so that you have a baseline for measurement. Whether you are improving or otherwise, you know where you are starting from. - Dream big, start small.
Everyone can dream big, but to achieve it, you must break down your dream into smaller steps, just like the milestones towards your destiny. Make a vision board and start visualising successes. Take incremental steps and benchmark your journey. - Announce it.
Another important success factor is to announce it and commit to it. Compare to working on something privately and quietly, sharing your dreams with friends and family can create a strong support structure. You can post your resolutions in your social media or even share it here in the comment section. - Get the right tools, make it convenient for you.
If you do not have a strong will, your mind will spot every single obstacle and convince you to give up. To avoid that from happening, you must get ready the right tools, and identify the potential obstacles. Once you know your obstacles, remove them in advance, and replace them with things that will make it convenient for you (so that you have no excuses). - Never give up.
Along the way, you may encounter obstacles you have never thought of, embrace your obstacles and be flexible, try to find ways to work around it. Whenever you fall short, take a break, review your strategy and pick up from where you left off. - Keep a record.
Display a clear target, purpose, and strategy in your vision board is a good start. Keeping a record is the second important thing to help you track your progresses, pace your momentum, and motivate you to move on. - Pause and review.
Frequent reviews on your progresses are crucial to make sure you are on the right track. You would not want to spend a year of effort and realise you have walked the wrong path or wasted time of focusing the wrong target. - Reward yourself.
Your reward doesn’t have to be end of the year, it depends how long you set your target. Be it 1 month intervals, on achievement, or until you succeed. Define your carrot, aim for it, and that’s going to push you through the hard times.
Conclusion
There is nothing more important than keeping a good health and sound finances for your retirement age. These 2 aspects are interlinked, whichever fall short will definitely affect the other. Which is also why, you must take good care of both components from now.
My new year’s resolution is to continue posting useful blog articles to educate the young-old generation on taking good care of themselves, be it physically, mentally, or financially, so to delay the needs for nursing care that may burden the healthcare system. It is counter-intuitive to keep on building nursing care facilities when we still have time to bring awareness and make good changes for the future elderly cohorts. Let’s spread the message and good vibes to as many people as you can. Starting from yourself, your action today can have ripple effect on the future landscape of eldercare.
