As January begins, New Year’s resolutions are top of mind for millions, but within weeks, many of those goals will be abandoned despite best intentions. It doesn’t have to be that way, says Bryan Saville, a psychology professor at James Madison University and a health and wellness coach.

“A lot of people start, and by the end of the first month, probably more than 50 percent of people have kind of given up,” Saville said in an interview on Charlottesville Right Now. “And I think that’s often because people don’t have a good structure to follow as they’re planning for how they’re going to approach these resolutions.”

According to Saville, anyone planning a significant lifestyle change should follow several specific steps, starting with identifying values.

“Your values are your deepest desires for who you want to be as a person and how you want to behave,” he said.  “Values are things like if you say, ‘I want to behave healthily. I want to behave assertively. I want to behave generously.’”

The next step is setting a behavioral goal instead of focusing on the outcome.

“An outcome would be something like, ‘I want to weigh 150 pounds. I want to get an A on my psychology exam. I want to be employee of the month,’” he said. “Those are okay to sort of keep in the back of your mind, but the question is, what do you have to do to move toward those outcome goals?”

With values identified and a goal set, Saville recommends leveraging public accountability either through social media or simply by telling friends or family about the goal.

“We are social beings, and we respond very well to both positive social consequences and negative social consequences. So if somebody says to you, ‘great job,’ that feels really good. And that can be highly motivating,” he said.

Tracking progress is another trick to staying on track.

“Sometimes our progress is so small on a day-to-day basis, but only when you go back and look over it, look back at it over time, do you see, I’ve really made a lot of progress,” he said. “Importantly, there’s actually some research showing that simply tracking your behavior can be enough to have a positive effect on your behavior. “

Saville says changing behaviors is challenging, so creating rewards along the way can help maintain motivation.

“If you’ve been staying in bed in the morning every single morning rather than getting up and exercising, it’s hard to break that habit unless you might have some reward out there that’s really sort of pulling you out of bed and getting you going.”

The final tip Saville offers may be the most important.

“Be compassionate with yourself,” he said. “We are all going to fail. It’s human for us not to reach every single goal. I’m sure we’ve all done that before. We tried something, we failed. We feel bad about ourselves. But if we simply go, you know what? This is normal to fail. Let me reconnect with my values. Let me go back to why this is important. Sometimes even if you don’t hit your goals, simply realizing you’ve been living the kind of life you want to live is enough to sort of keep you going.”

Listen to the full interview with Bryan Saville here.