What's better than a New Year’s resolution? Exponentially increase your odds of success by trying this instead.

How many times have you made a resolution—at any time of year—only to fail to reach your goal or keep your promise to yourself? That promise is your resolution, the solution to your problem. Losing weight, quitting smoking, or some other idea of what is going on in your life, the odds are low that you’ll stick to it.

So how to create fresh energy at New Year’s or any time of year? Set the energy. Get to the core of what you really want. Health, peace, motivation, joy, or courage, to name a few, are unlikely to manifest unless you focus on the energy you’re creating.

To accomplish the energy of health, you remove any behaviors, thoughts, or emotions that contribute to poor health. Consider health in terms of mind, body, and feelings, not just dieting. If you don't address the other components, simply changing your eating won’t work.

To accomplish the energy of peace, remove any people, situations, thoughts, or behaviors that create anxiety. Peace is a state of calm centeredness. Looking at in this way helps identify the circumstances that produce peace in your life. It might be to make a deeper connection with nature, Spirit, or shift how you approach relationships.

For the energy of motivation, clear away clogs to your process by cleaning up and removing clutter, by going places you’ve never been, or by hanging out with people who enjoy brainstorming. This serves to generate new ideas and helps get you excited about whatever you’re working on. This then leads to feeling motivated toward whatever you’re working on.

The energy of joy in your life has to do with the way you think about it. If you see it as, “I’ll be happy when…” and that situation never happens, your joy stymies. Instead, be in the moment, find something beautiful or joyful in your present circumstance, and focus on that. If you have a pet, notice how they stay in the moment. Playing with a stuffed toy can bring them boundless joy! Use their example of happiness in the moment. It will help develop the habit of finding something fun, funny, or fantastic in everyday moments.

If courage is what you crave, use psychologist Alfred Adler’s technique of acting as if. Act as though you already have courage and push through the fear of introducing yourself to a stranger at a party, the fear of exploring who you really are at the core, or purging the things or people who undermine your self-confidence. Having courage also addresses anxiety, since fear is a major component of feeling anxiety. Displaying courage in mind and behavior is the ability to choose a different way of being, despite the discomfort.

Choose the energy you’d like to focus on and apply these techniques above. You’ll experience a gradual shift and notice that the new way of being then becomes the default. Once it’s second nature, you’ll find you can do it with little thought.