Around this time of year, a lot of you will be thinking about or making new years resolutions; promises to yourself about things you want to accomplish in 2024.
The principle is commendable but the reality is that most new years resolutions fail, often within the first few weeks of the year. Setting goals for the new year is better than not doing so, but if you approach them in the standard way your chances of success are low.
The first problem with new years resolutions is that you are making promises to yourself. This isn’t a reason they fail, but does have significant implications.
When you break promises you make to yourself you damage your self-confidence in the process, because the foundation of self-confidence is making promises to yourself and keeping them.
So when you fail to sustain those promises, not only do you not reap the benefits of what you were intending to do, but you also give your mental judge more ammunition to tell you why you’re a failure, not capable, not worthy and so on.
Over the next three weeks we’ll look at:
Why most New Years resolutions fail;
A better way to approach your goals for the new year that massively increases your odds of achieving them; and
Three things you can do to save yourself huge amounts of focus and mental capacity.
Why your resolutions don’t work
People come up with incredibly creative excuses for why their new years resolutions don’t stick, but most of them boil down to one or more of the following three reasons:
1. They are too specific, too trivial or too random
If your goals aren’t connected to a “why”, or anything that is deeply important to you, their impact won’t be important enough to sustain momentum. For example, you might have had an amazing time running next to the beach this holiday and decide that you want to carry on running 5km every day when you’re home.
That is a laudable goal, but if there is nothing deeper than, “I want to run 5km”, the first obstacles that get in the way will derail you.
On the other end of the spectrum, deciding that you want to run every day while stuffed to the brim with good Christmas food and wine, not having exercised much at all in the recent past is a recipe for disappointing yourself before the month is out.
2. Your resolutions are made in a different environment than your day-to-day life
The reason or context for your goal is different. When you make a commitment to do something, you’re much more likely to achieve it when you do it in the environment where you spend most of your time.
Going for a run on a beautiful beachfront every morning while on holiday was easy and sustainable, but now you’re back home and in your day-to-day routine:
you don’t have as much time available
you have shorter, specific windows where you could run but
there are other people and responsibilities demanding your attention and
you don’t have 15 minutes to prep for the run — that total window is only 45 minutes long.
That once easy flow feels frustratingly inaccessible and putting it off one morning becomes putting it off for one week, and before you know it the closest you come to the exercise is talking about how you were running your 5km over the holidays.
Sometimes you think, “I’m so lazy”, but you just haven’t built the right environment for yourself to succeed.
3. They aren’t designed to be permanent
For any goal to stick, it must be something that changes you on the inside; a permanent, sustainable lifestyle change. Diets are a great example of this issue in action. Most are designed to promise short-term weight loss and come with significant resistance barriers:
they’re expensive
they require specific planning for every meal which works in the short term, but not so much in the long term
the food isn’t all that enjoyable.
Even if you do find a diet that avoids those issues, if it isn’t part of an intentional, long-term, meaningful change it becomes all too easy to gradually just leave it behind in the busyness of life. It’s not really about meaningful change, it’s a trivial whim.
So what is the alternative?
Committing to resolutions that last
It all boils down to discipline.
By discipline I mean creating a structure that will help you make your change permanent.
Don’t just add another thing to your already overwhelming to-do list. To stick with the running example, applying discipline isn’t about gritting your teeth and forcing yourself onto the road (although that might still be necessary some days). In this case, discipline is making sure you structure and schedule your life to ensure that your new running habit is sustainable.
When you create structure and literally update your schedule (on your calendaring app, for example) you’ll be able to notice the days that you aren’t honouring your commitment and can adjust your rhythm accordingly. You might also realise that your goal isn’t reasonable in your context, but it is possible to achieve a similar result by tweaking your approach.
Next week we’ll take a look at a new way to approach setting goals for your year. May you have an excellent final few days of 2023, and I’ll speak to you again in 2024.