2012 is finally here. With it, come new opportunities as well as new challenges. With it also comes a ritual that many practice — making resolutions. These include overcoming temptations like overeating, and increasing or incorporating exercise into our lives. Others may include saving money and other issues designed to improve our lives, or make us better people. While these come with the best of intentions, chances are that many resolutions made at the stroke of midnight, have already gone by the wayside, as statistics have indicated that setting goals and keeping them, takes real commitment.

In truth, resolutions endure when they are driven by passion. They also endure when we are truly committed to change. Below are some of the things that have worked for me. Perhaps they will work for others also.

• Visualize your resolution. Say you want to lose weight.  Having inherited the Webster women’s (my mother’s and aunts’ maiden name) genes of large breasts and large hips, compounded by my love of peach cobbler with extra crust and all things chocolate, losing weight has always been an annual resolution. Picturing how I will look when I am a few pounds lighter, or imagining how I think I’ll feel, has helped me shed a few pounds over the years.

• Saying your resolution out loud. Annually, I add advancing my freelance writing business as a resolution. Stating my goals out loud and sharing them with friends has helped me to increase the articles I write and finding other opportunities to make money with my craft.

• Have a plan for achieving goals. It’s now history that “The Venus Chronicles” morphed from “On the Feminine Side” a blog that I wrote just for fun. For the past year or so, I have contributed a career column to a local non-profit job site, http://content.opportunityknocks.org/2010/09/14/establishing-and-maintaining-a-culture-of-retention-in-todays-organizations. This column allows me to write about business subjects that resonate with me so I strive to contribute a number of columns throughout the year. One way to do this has been to always have a column draft. Having a theme or article in draft form means I can tweak it into 700 words fairly quickly.

• Having passion helps you to achieve goals. Writing to me is as important as breathing. That I also have opinions on everything, possess an insatiable appetite for learning and for experiencing life to the fullest, ensures that I will always have something to write about and to share.

• Listen to your own heart. How many times have well-meaning relatives or friends pooh-poohed something that you told them that you wanted to do? How many times have they told you how hard what you wanted to do was or how many others had tried it and failed etc?  Truthfully, it’s often hard for them to see beyond our current reality. Listening to our own hearts allows us to tap into our inner selves and achieve things we might otherwise not even attempt. Likewise, believing that you can achieve whatever you set your mind will also help you stick to your resolutions.