Resolve to be more cautious

Taking your personal life online begs the caution that "WWW" still stands for "Wild, Wild West." So, if you're looking for a support group for your New Year's resolutions, look first to real people you know and trust and use the Web with caution.

It may seem odd that the host of the Web site 10millionresolutions.com would give such advice, but Gary Ryan Blair found out first-hand how wild and woolly the Web can be when he hosted an open resolutions forum one year ago.

"We learned right way it had problems," he said. "The forum was like a bulletin board, almost like a MySpace," where people's posted resolutions attracted responses like "you're kidding!" and "how ridiculous," he said.

Since then, his online goal-boosting efforts have become much more structured: participants have to register and pay a monthly fee to participate. Members channel themselves into communities that are also setting goals and ready to offer support. "The networking that goes on — it's outstanding when it's done in a structured environment."

The best support group, Blair said, "is still the people to your left and right — your family, the people you work with."

Fellow goal-setting professional Greg Helmstetter, chief executive of mygoals.com, said a public commitment to keeping a goal results in "an amazingly powerful commitment" as long as it's the right goal publicized to the right people.

"Avoid discussing your goals with naysayers," Helmstetter's site counsels. "It's unfortunate, but many people who see others striving to improve themselves are reminded that they themselves could use some improvement. Rather than setting goals of their own, they find it easier to belittle or ridicule the goals of others."

Helmstetter's online approach to helping people achieve their goals is to sign up members, give them goal-setting advice and then let the user define goals they want to be reminded of via e-mail. The periodic e-mail is "really good at just keeping it in your mind," Helmstetter said.

The e-mail prompts are especially useful with resolutions that tend to be made "on one day of the year" because the success in keeping a resolution "involves changes they make over many days of the year," he said. "So just sticking with it is the most important thing."

One tool Blair has built from a collection of more than 300,000 survey responses is a top-10 list of the most popular resolutions, something likely to let most resolution-setters know they aren't alone in the changes they want to make. The list is detailed on Blair's other motivational site, www.goalsguy.com.

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