'Have realistic goals': Psychologist emphasizes celebrating small successes in the new year

Goals and resolutions in 2025 Psychologist emphasizes the importance of realistic goal-setting and tracking progress to boost success rates by 30%.

Setting new priorities in the new year can be tricky, but feasible with healthy methods. Registered psychologist Dr. Ganz Ferrance joined CTV Morning Live Edmonton to discuss realistic goal setting and the importance of celebrating small successes.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Kent Morrison: Many begin the new year cleaning out their physical space, mental space, and setting priorities for what’s ahead. It can be beneficial, if done in a healthy way. First of all, what is it about this shift into a new year that has so many people, either consciously or subconsciously, wanting to set these priorities?

Dr. Ganz Ferrance: The truth is, you can set priorities (or) reset them any time of the year – and even several times a day – if you want to. But there is something about the natural end of the year and all the energy around everybody else setting goals, like “A new year, a new you.” There’s a lot of momentum. I think it’s good when we understand what we’re doing to take advantage of that momentum and get some stuff sorted out and figure out what you want to do going forward.

Kent: What are some ways to ensure you achieve your goals?

Dr. Ganz: A couple things. One is you want to be realistic about what your goals are. You don’t want to change 15 things or some deeply ingrained things right away. You want to start small, build momentum, get some success, keep them going, and ride that wave that way. One of the things is writing stuff down, just so you can see the goal and then track it. When you track and measure what you’re doing, you probably get about a 30 percent boost in your compliance and your success rate of actually doing that. Small goals, keep track and make them real.

Kent: Now they can be deeply personal as well, which means you might want to keep them just to yourself. Is there a benefit of telling other people what your goals are?

Dr. Ganz: That’s a great question. Yes and no, depends on who you tell and depends on what the reasons are. Generally, we think of resolutions like we’re going to make this big declaration, and all this other stuff, right? But, the success rate goes up when we feel better, when we manage our state. If we tell people, and there’s all this stress on us, and we feel like we’re going to be failures if we don’t comply all the time, that stress makes us less likely to meet our goals. What I tell my clients is: You want to get what some people call “accountability partners.” I prefer to call them “celebration partners.” You get people that say, “OK, you tell me stuff that you’ve done really well towards your goal, I’ll tell you, and we’ll celebrate together. We’ll pat each other on the back. We’ll cheer for each other.” You have somebody, and you can borrow somebody else’s enthusiasm to help you get further along. It can be accountability, but you want to take the weight off it. You don’t want to put too much pressure on yourself.

Kent: When or how do you celebrate these goals, knowing that this is a long-term thing?

Dr. Ganz: I’m glad you said long term, because one of the best ways to create change is to make it a habit, as opposed to thinking of a goal as something you have to hit to be successful. If you think about it as building a habit, you can make some mistakes, you can fall, get back up and keep going. With the idea of celebration, the more often you celebrate, the better. Celebration is a fuel for future success. If you fall down and get back up, you celebrate that. If you haven’t fallen down for a while, you celebrate that. Any little thing that looks like success or not going backwards or catching yourself quickly before you go too far backwards. You want to celebrate that, because that changes your state, and because you change your state, you have much more energy, focus, and momentum to go ahead and meet those goals. So celebrate as often as you can.