Do you find it challenging to stay consistent with your New Year’s resolutions?
You’ve been there. You’ve started with the best of intentions to shift a behavior or achieve a goal, but then work demands increase, so you can’t make it to the gym three times a week. Or maybe an unexpected shift at home makes it nearly impossible for you to complete that new certification in the evenings; you know, the one that will help supercharge your movement up the career ladder.
While we all set goals at times, the start of the year is when we take a deep breath, hold our heads to the sky, and make proclamations. “New year, new me!” Using New Year’s resolutions, we aim to become better versions of ourselves. According to a December 2025 article from YouGov, the most popular New Year’s resolutions for Americans include:
- Exercising more (25%)
- Being happy (23%)
- Eating healthier (22%)
- Saving more money (21%)
- Improving physical health (21%)
While we start each year with the best of intentions to accomplish our goals, our ability to maintain momentum diminishes over time. One study suggests that only 19% of responders reported maintaining their New Year’s Resolutions two years later. With stress levels leveling, but still above pre-COVID measurements, keeping resolutions is increasingly emotionally complex.
Why New Year’s Resolutions Are Not The Best Tool
To be clear, New Year’s resolutions are not bad. For the minority who stick with them, they can dramatically improve their quality of life. However, whether you are excellent at keeping resolutions or one of the four in five people who don’t, 10-year vision boards will likely produce better results.
Imagine looking around your house and thinking, “I need to mop the floor, buy a new tablecloth, and try out a new recipe for delicious chocolate chip cookies.” You may do all three of those things today. Or, more likely, you’ll find the tasks incomplete and yourself having the same thought three months from now.
Now, instead of the above scenario, envision yourself deciding that you will host a dinner party at the end of the week. You picture your friends around your dining table, laughing uproariously as they sample yummy homemade delectables. After a delicious meal, you invite the group into the living room for Charades and Taboo. Sounds like a fun evening, right? Well, once you send out the invitations, you’ll naturally spring into action. You are committed, and you want to see your vision materialize. The result is that you will not only spend the next few days mopping your floor, buying a tablecloth, and trying out the new cookie recipe, but you will also plan a menu, buy groceries, and may even add some other special touches. In effect, the vision of your destination will drive you to take the actions needed to reach it.
Rather than tasks, we need a destination or a clear vision of a projected future to accomplish our goals consistently.
Why You Need a 10-Year Vision
We futurists often help people envision future scenarios 10 years or more away. One reason is that people tend to overestimate how much they can accomplish in a year but greatly underestimate how much change can occur in ten years. Think about who you were ten years ago. How have you changed? How has the world changed in ten years? What aspects of your life now would have shocked the you of ten years ago? Who do you want to be in ten years? What do you want your life to look like? How might the world look? Now, on a piece of paper, jot down your ideas. How will you look and feel? Where will you live? What will your social life look like? Define your relationships. What kind of work or volunteer activities might you have? Be as clear as possible, using as many adjectives as you can so you can feel 2036 you.
Several scientific studies suggest that not only are humans not exceptionally gifted at envisioning their long-term future, but many of us actually see the future version of ourselves as a different person! The result is that we don’t have the same level of empathy, nor do we plan for our future selves’ futures as we do for our current selves.
In another study, participants interacted with realistic, age-progressed versions of themselves using virtual reality or simple decision tools. Those who saw clear images of their future selves saved more for retirement and were more willing to wait for larger rewards than people in the control group or those shown a generic future person. This behavior suggests that when a person feels more connected to their future self, they’re less likely to treat that future self as a stranger.
Creating a 10-year vision board can not only provide us with a clear destination but also help us collapse the concepts of our current self with those of our 10-year self, allowing us to act in our best overall interest, not just in the interest of our present-day self.
How to Create a 10-Year New Year’s Resolution Vision Board
First, put a specific date at the top of your vision board. It may be January 1, 2036. The goal is to capture a moment in time, not a date range. The board represents you and what your life will be like on that date in ten years. Next, decide if your vision board will be digital or physical. The important thing is to ensure you’ll see it daily. My vision board is a physical poster board that sits on my bedroom dresser.
Yours may be a device screen saver. Next, gather your images! You may find great pictures online, or you may purchase a couple of magazines to cut out. Please allow yourself to really dream. Include not only images that represent things you own, but also habits and experiences you will be having ten years from now. Include the types of relationships you’ll enjoy. I often include pictures of loved ones. You may want to use AI or an image-editing app to age-progress yourself and realistically tweak your appearance based on your new lifestyle choices. Don’t stop until you can really feel that future.
If you’re a private person, you can construct your board by yourself. However, you can also turn this into a party, creating boards with friends and family. My husband and I make a joint vision board. In fact, depending on your organization’s culture, it may be fun to create company or department vision boards, using the original 10-year span or shortening it to 5 years.
Lastly, place your creation somewhere you will see it daily. Then, begin the habit of thinking about what you need to start doing now to get there. Maybe the goal isn’t a New Year’s Resolution to lose 50 pounds in one year to get to your perfect weight. Instead, your new goal is to cut back on sugary beverages and replace them with healthier options, knowing it will help you lose weight gradually and possibly with greater ease. Perhaps, rather than overcommitting to go to the gym five times a week, you aim for twice a week and commit to taking a 30-minute walk every day, especially on days when life gets in the way of your making it to the gym. In the end, the 10-Year New Year’s vision board will lead you away from chasing extreme goals and into actually becoming the person you want to be.
