1. Spend More Time with Family & Friends
Travel.com researched and listed the top New Year's resolutions. According to their list, more than 50% of people want to spend more time with loved ones, making it the most popular resoution. While it's a popular and admirable goal, it requires planning ahead and making time. One way to make that happen is to give back to your community. Volunteering is a social activity, and many people choose to volunteer with their friends and family. It’s a free and low cost activity to do with others, and best of all it’s a win-win situation. It will impact your local community, expand your network and resume, while encouraging you to spend extra time with your loved ones. Resolution to reality!
2. Lose Weight
According to the World Health Organization, approximately 1.9 billion people worldwide are either overweight or obese, so it’s no surprise that losing weight is the second most popular New Year's resolution. Community service is the perfect opportunity to encourage an active and healthy lifestyle. Activities like planting trees, running 5Ks, helping manage outdoor events, among many others will help you lose weight, and more importantly build self-esteem. Volunteering is a form of self-care, encouraging you to help others which in turn helps yourself.
3. Quit Smoking
Smoking is one of the most difficult and addictive habits to quit, and it’s encouraging that so many people want to quit as their New Year's resolution. The American Cancer Society mentions the helpful tip to avoid people and activities that encourage or trigger smoking. It also highlights that it’s easier to quit smoking if you focus on bettering yourself holistically, including eating well, exercising, and making positive strides towards a different lifestyle. Like losing weight, volunteering can encourage quitting smoking because it builds self-esteem and promotes a healthier lifestyle. Community service can also create a distracttion during cravings by promoting positive behaviors.
4. Learn Something New
Yes you can Google or YouTube anything you want to know these days, but volunteering your time can provide an entirely different and in-depth learning experiene. Giving your time teaches you a multitude of new things about yourself and the community. It also teaches you new skills, which is extremely useful in life. As we highlighted in our post “10 Amazing Volunteer Stats," companies often assign tasks to volunteers that lead to new skills. An effective way to achieve this resolution and even take it a step further is to get involved and volunteer!
5. Help Others
This popular resolution gets at the heart of giving back. Just about every volunteer activity or community service opportunity will lead to helping others.
Setting New Year's resolutions is an effective way to better yourself, but you want to avoid setting yourself up for failure. We challenge you to pair your resolutions with volunteerism, as a way to reinforce your commitment to yourself and to your goals. You will be more likely to reach your goals, and you'll also receive several other benefits of giving your time to others, which means you'll have reasons to celebrate all year long.
At MobileServe, we believe sharing stories of service encourages others to give back and that an individual volunteer's story can have an exponential effect. We'd love to hear how volunteerism helped you achieve a personal goal, or how you plan to give back this year.
Email us your story, and we'll send you a free service resume or a free social impact report for your organization.
