Drawing on the neuroscience of habit formation and goal-setting, I’ve developed a plan for setting and keeping resolutions that will stick.

In this short webinar, I’ll teach you how to set goals that are realistic and achievable, and that will stick with you over the long-term. Start the New Year from a position of strength!

The goal setting worksheet is going to be helpful to have on hand when you watch.

Download the Goal Setting Worksheet Here

This webinar supports our Habits & Resolutions theme in my Brave Over Perfect Group Coaching Program. If you’d like support in forming a new habit or would like to be a part of a community of people on a similar journey, I hope you’ll join us! We’re kicking off the year talking about New Year’s Resolutions and how to create new habits for ourselves. Use the code BESTYEARYET to enroll for just $10. Learn more or enroll now.

Feeling overwhelmed? Wondering how you’re going to get it all done? Wishing you could just lie down? You aren’t alone.

The holidays can be stressful. Often, there’s a lot to do and a lot to buy and a lot of people to see. Sometimes we get so busy we have a hard time enjoying events that we’re otherwise looking forward to.

But we can make this holiday season less stressful for ourselves. Below are two tips to enjoy the holidays more.

1. Accept that the holidays will probably be, at times, disappointing

Bet you weren’t expecting that one! But acceptance is a strangely effective strategy for feeling happier and more relaxed at any time of the year. When we accept a person or a situation we find challenging, we let go of the resistance that creates stress and tension. There’s a lot of truth to the adage that “what we resist, persists.”

Here’s how this works. When someone or something is being a pain in your rear, take a deep breath and accept the situation. Say to yourself something like, “I accept that Jane is upset right now; I allow this situation to be as it is.” Then notice how you are feeling, and accept how you are feeling, as well. You can say to yourself, “I accept that I am feeling angry at Jane and disappointed. I allow my feelings to be as they are right now.”

If accepting a disappointing situation or person seems too hard for you, here are the handy alternatives you’re left with:

• You can judge and criticize others and the disappointing situation in general, and blame others for your own negative feelings. As a bonus, everyone around you will no doubt feel your judgment. Some people will likely feel wrongly accused, or like you are trying to “fix” them. You’ll achieve the dual outcomes of being hurtful to others while simultaneously making yourself feel tense and lonely.
• Another alternative to acceptance is to nurse your anxiety and despair over the situation through rumination. To ruminate effectively, think about what is wrong with the situation or person as often as possible. Don’t let yourself become distracted from the negative. Tell everyone what you don’t like about the situation or person. This will successfully amplify both your negative feelings and the difficulty of the situation.
• You can also definitely deny how difficult the situation is by pretending that nothing is bothering you. You can stuff your hard feelings down by drinking too much or by staying really, really busy and stressed. Simply avoid situations and people you don’t want to deal with, because that’s more important than participating in meaningful traditions and events.

Criticism, judgment, rumination, blaming, denial, and avoidance are almost like holiday rituals for some of us. But they are all tactics of resistance, and they won’t protect you. Ironically, these tactics will allow the disappointments or difficulties to further embed themselves into your psyche.

This is a long-winded way of pointing out that resistance doesn’t make us less stressed or more joyful in difficult situations. What does work is to simply accept that the circumstance is currently hard. We can accept a difficult situation, and still make an effort to improve things. This gentle acceptance does not mean that you are resigned to a miserable holiday, or that nothing you do will make the situation better. Maybe it will get better—and maybe it won’t.

Accepting the reality of a difficult situation allows us to soften. This softening opens the door to our own compassion and wisdom; and we all know that over the holidays, we are going to need those things.

2. Let go of expectations while turning your attention to what you appreciate

Some people (myself included) suffer from what I think of as an abundance paradox: Because we have so much, it becomes easy to take our good fortune for granted. As a result, we are more likely to feel disappointed when we don’t get what we want than to feel grateful when we do.

This tendency can be especially pronounced during the holidays, when we tend to have high hopes that everything will be perfect and wonderful and memorable. You might have a fantasy of a sweet, close relationship with an in-law, for instance, or grand ideas about the perfect Christmas Eve dinner.

This sort of hope, as my dear friend Susie Rinehart has reminded me, can be a slippery slope to unhappiness: Hoping a holiday event will be the best-ever can quickly become a feeling that we won’t be happy unless it is, leading to sadness and disappointment when reality doesn’t live up to our ideal.

Unfortunately, the reality of the holidays is unlikely to ever outdo our fantasies of how great everything could be. So the trick is to ditch our expectations and instead notice what is actually happening in the moment. And then find something about that moment to appreciate.

Can you appreciate that your spouse did a lot of planning (or dishes, or shopping) this week? Do you feel grateful that you have enough food for your holiday table? Are you thankful for your health (or if your health is not great, that you are still here)?

It’s enough to notice and appreciate the small things, but when I’m having trouble with this, I like to practice an extreme form of gratitude that involves contemplating how fleeting our lives may be. There’s nothing like facing death to make us appreciate our lives—and sure enough, research finds that when people visualize their own death in detail, their gratitude increases.

If you feel stuck on what isn’t going well rather than what is, set aside some time to reflect on the following questions. Take each question one at a time, and try journaling an answer to each before moving on to the next one.

• What would I do if this were the last holiday season I had left to live? What would I do the same, and what would I do differently?
• What would I do if this were the last holiday season that my spouse, parents, or children had left to live? What would I do the same, and what would I do differently?

It’s a little heavy, I know, but contemplating death does tend to put things in perspective.

As the holidays approach, we will likely feel stressed and exhausted, but we need not feel like victims to this time of year. We often have a great deal of choice about what we do and how we feel. We can choose to bring acceptance to difficult situations and emotions, and we can choose to turn our attention to the things that we appreciate.

This holiday season, may we all see abundance when it is all around us—not an abundance of stuff, necessarily, but rather an abundance of love and connection. Even during the difficult bits.

When one of our teens, who shall remain nameless, was 15, my husband Mark and I got a surprising email from another parent we’ll call Maureen. Our teen had decided to go to a concert with Maureen’s daughter, Maddie, and she was writing to let us know that she would be driving.

The problem was that our daughter hadn’t bothered to tell us about her plans with Maddie—because the concert conflicted with an important dinner with our huge extended family.

It wasn’t that our daughter didn’t want to go to the family dinner. She did. She loves her cousins and genuinely looks forward to seeing them. It was that she desperately wanted to go to the concert, too. How could she choose?

“You don’t GET to choose!” was my knee-jerk reaction. Still, she pushed it. “Absolutely not!” I cried. “Family comes before friends! Family is the most important thing!”

Our teenager dug in. The conversation was over on our end, but she didn’t let it go; we heard through Maureen that she’d told Maddie that she was still coming, no matter what we said. We told Maureen that there was no chance (in hell) that she’d be going to that concert, but “thank you so much” anyway.

When our daughter heard that we’d overruled her again through Maureen, she was livid. “It’s MY LIFE,” she seethed. “You can make me go to dinner, but you can’t make me have fun.” And with that, she quietly left the room. Mark and and I looked at each other, wide-eyed. She had a point.

Why teens need control

Our teenager had just fired us as her management team, this time for good. She had had it with our bossy and controlling ways.

Years ago, Mike Riera, author of Uncommon Sense for Parents of Teenagers and an educator I respect a lot, had warned me that this would happen. But, honestly, I just couldn’t imagine it at the time. I thought that I’d always get to manage my children’s lives, at least while they were living under my roof. I’m good at managing my family. I should be promoted when my kids get older, I used to think, not fired.

But once kids reach adolescence, they need to start managing their own lives, and they do tend to fire us as their managers. Parents who are too controlling—those who don’t step down from their manager roles—breed rebellion. Many kids with micromanaging parents will politely agree to the harsh limits their parents set with a “yes, sir” or “yes, ma’am” attitude, but then will break those rules the first chance they get. They do this not because they are bad kids, but because they need to regain a sense of control over their own lives.

This cannot be overstated: Healthy, self-disciplined, motivated teenagers have a strong sense of control over their lives. A mountain of research demonstrates that agency is one of the most important contributors to both success and happiness. Believing that we can influence our own lives (through our own efforts) predicts practically all of the positive outcomes that we want for our children: better health and longevity, lower use of drugs and alcohol, lower stress, higher emotional well-being, greater intrinsic motivation and self-discipline, improved academic performance, and even greater career success.

Even teens who don’t have a rebellious streak and who won’t lie or hide their behavior suffer when parents micromanage them. Those kids tend to expend emotional energy resisting advice from their parents that is clearly in their best interest, simply to regain a sense of control.

Giving freedom within limits

The answer, according to neuropsychologist William Stixrud and teen coach Ned Johnson, authors of The Self-Driven Child, is to hand the decision-making reins over to our teens. You read that right: By adolescence, we parents need to (take a deep breath and) let them make their own decisions about their lives.

Letting our teens become the decision-makers doesn’t mean that we become permissive, indulgent, or disengaged parents. Fifty years of research has consistently shown that “authoritative” parenting is good for teens’ health and well-being. Authoritative parents set and consistently enforce clear limits, andthey are warm and engaged in their kids’ lives. Authoritative parenting helps kids develop self-control—making them less likely to have problems with drugs, alcohol, or teen pregnancy. Teenagers with authoritative parents do better in school, have greater self-confidence, and have more friends.

So how in the world are we supposed to be authoritative parents once we’ve been fired as our kids’ managers, and once we are letting them make their own decisions? There are two equal parts to parenting-without-managing:

Part One: We establish age-appropriate family rules—like time limits on technology use and expectations about drug and alcohol use—in a supportive, involved way. We don’t dictate the rules; we discuss them. This way, our teens have a safe space to operate in without becoming overwhelmed by everything they need to do and learn.

Part Two: We hand over all further decision-making to our kids. They are free to operate autonomously within the limits that we’ve set. (Yes, it can be a challenge to decide what deserves a rule, and what can be left up to a teen—and exactly when we start handing over decision-making. I will offer more guidance in a future article.)

Decision-making is an incredibly important skill that teens must develop before they can be truly independent. When we require that they make their own decisions—instead of just making them for them, as Mark and I did when we insisted our daughter come to family dinner—we give them really valuable practice. They learn to look within themselves to understand their often-conflicting motivations and feelings. They learn to consider their own values, and the values of their family. They gain experience making decisions and then feeling accountable for the consequences of their decisions.

There’s really good news here: Teens who are given both limits and the freedom to make their own decisions tend to be self-driven and self-disciplined. This means that they’ll tell themselves “no” before we have to—and I probably don’t need to point out that that makes parenting a heck of a lot more fun.

Letting teens make mistakes

But what if teens don’t know what they don’t know? And what if they don’t want what we want for them, or if they really don’t know what is best for them? What if we know they will make the wrong decision?

Taking decision-making power away from them won’t help them become good decision-makers, nor is it a particularly good way to influence them. This is in part because, to paraphrase Stixrud and Johnson:

1. We can’t make our teens want something they don’t want.
2. We can’t make them not want something they do want.

And so it’s true: Sometimes our kids will make really bad decisions. Decision-making can be challenging, and it’s unrealistic to think they’ll do it perfectly. Adolescence is a period of time when kids have their learner’s permit for life, when (in ideal circumstances) they still have built-in support when they make mistakes. Which, again, they will. Often, human beings need to really struggle in order to learn and grow. And this means they’ll need to make their own mistakes, sometimes big ones.

If it will help them make an informed decision, we can neutrally offer our opinion. This is hard for me. We have to practice nonchalance. And then we (take a deep breath and) say: “It’s your call.”

Of course, we don’t need to enthusiastically (or financially) support all of our kids’ decisions. We can still mention when we feel uneasy with a decision they’re making, so long as we are sharing our feelings and not our judgments. This might mean that we say something like, “It makes me feel sad to see you so tired and anxious. I’m worried that the cost of taking such a heavy course load might be too high. But it’s your call.”

When we allow kids to make their own decisions, they don’t waste their limited energy resisting us just so that they can feel a modicum of control over their own lives. Suddenly, they stop seeming so irrational and teenagery—opposing things that are in their own best interest—and they start acting like the mature young adults they are becoming.

This is ultimately what happened with the family dinner/concert conflict: I apologized for my knee-jerk reaction, and told my daughter that while we really hoped she would be at our family dinner, it was her call. If she decided not to come to the dinner, we asked her to communicate her decision to the rest of the family herself. If she was going to make her own decisions, she could also practice taking accountability for them.

Once the choice was truly hers, our daughter decided not to go to the concert. And she actually seemed happy about her decision. She came to the family dinner, and she had fun.