With the New Year rapidly approaching, your thoughts will be turning to your New Years Resolutions. It's the time of year when you set your sights on the next year and decide what you want to achieve.

Are you planning on stopping smoking? Getting fitter? Losing a bit of weight or getting a new job?

These are a few of the perennial favourite New Years resolutions, though obviously, there are a lot more possible New Years resolutions.

When setting a New Years resolution, most people don't really spend a lot of time thinking about what they really want to achieve. You've probably heard people say something like, "I ought to stop smoking this year" or "I really should lose a bit of weight".

If you set resolutions like that, then you are setting yourself up for failure. You don't really want to achieve them, you just feel guilty and that you should do them bfor whatever reason.

The trouble is, unless you have some motivation and desire to achieve your resolutions, then you are not going to achieve them. It is absolutely vital that you pick New Years resolutions that you really want to achieve and then follow through on them with action.

When many people set their New Years resolutions they almost expect something magical to happen on January 1st and the resolutions to happen without any effort at all. The trouble is, this doesn't happen. You have to take some sort of action to make your resolutions happen.

Before the New Year happens, sit and think about your New Years Resolutions. What do you want to achieve next year? When you know this, then you can spend some time working out an action plan to make sure you can achieve it. If you want to stop smoking, get some help whether this is a stop smoking CD or a visit to a clinical hypnotist or even nicotine patches. If you wnat to lose weight, sign up for an exercise class, get some hypnosis programs to help or start a diet.

Without action you will fail at your New Years resolution. You deserve to succeed at them! So let's summarise with a quick checklist:

1) Decide upon your New Years resolutions 2) Create an action plan to achieve them 3) Take regular and consistent action to achieving your resolutions

Through this simple plan you will achieve your New Years resolutions so much easier.