“This time” you think “I’m sticking to it”.
Except, no, you’re probably not. Not if you are like the estimated 80 to 90% of people who give up on their New Year’s Resolutions by the end of February.
This isn’t an exercise in blame. There are many good reasons why a New Year’s Resolution could fail and none of them have anything to do with willpower or determination. The arbitrary ticking over the calendar into a New Year might provide a useful spur for some to kick in or out a habit, but for many the distinction between 31 December and 1 January is purely arbitrary. Unless you build your resolutions around something that is both meaningful and achievable, they are doomed to fail.
So, how can you break the Resolutions’ Curse? How can you make ones that stick?
Identify what you care about
Values are the underlying beliefs about the world that affect how we think and behave. So, it stands to reason that if you want to pick a habit that’s going to last, you need to connect it to a deep-seated value.
Here are some tried-and-tested ways to help you with this first part:
Using Experience
- Look back on times in your life when you felt proudest about your behaviour. Why did you feel that way?
- Look back on times when you felt you could have done better. Why did you feel that?
Thought experiments:
- What would you like people to say about you when you are no longer around?
- If you could only do 3 things in your life, what would they be?
Now from this, try to pick out some aspect of your thinking or behaviour that you value and want to do more. Maybe you believe in being kind but never model it for yourself. Maybe you value being inquisitive but find you are so busy you rarely set time aside to ask people about themselves.
An additional step that can be taken here is to link this value and change to something that is bigger than you. Maybe you really value respect. Well, of course one would hope that you’ll make a resolution to always treat others this way. But try to think beyond that. What impacts could this be having beyond your inner circle? Maybe the person you treat so respectfully goes on to do the same to many others and so on and so forth. The reason for thinking in this way is because we know that creating a “bigger why” (ie showing the way your actions can start to have ripple effects) can be very motivational when we start to flag.
Don’t depend on willpower alone
No human is an island. It’s unlikely that you, acting on sheer willpower alone, can deliver on your resolution. Conditions around you will need to be favourable.
One way to do this is simply to ask others to help. Perhaps they can do the Resolution with you. Maybe they can check-in with you once a week on how it’s going. Or they could help you spend an hour working out how you’re going to get started. Whatever it is, try to enlist support. At the very least you could share your resolution with others – doing that in itself creates some accountability.
The other important thing to consider are the barriers that have previously held you back from acting upon this desire for change. If you always wanted to listen better – what’s making it hard? Is it that you are burned out by work? Do you have too much on your to-do list? Do you need to set time aside to do this more often? In this example, while being busy and overworked are often difficult things to grapple with, sometimes small nudges can matter – for example, actually I do value an extra 10 minutes speaking to my partner over sending a few more emails.
Pick practical steps
Points 3 and 4 are, let’s be honest, pretty obvious. You won’t find many guides to New Year’s Resolution making that don’t include them. But that’s for a good reason – they do really help make a difference to your chances of succeeding. Make yourself a plan. Try to identify the immediate steps you will take to achieving it. Include in that plan what you will do if and when things go awry. If it’s raining all weekend and you struggle to go for that walk, is there something you can do instead? Or is there a message you can tell yourself that won’t leave you feeling like a failure?
Create feedback loops
How are you going to know you’re making progress? This could be through quite formal means – for example, creating targets (by February 1, I will have completed my Connector training) – or more informal such as keeping a journal of your experiences or ticking off days on a calendar.
Important with all this is to really feel progress. Not only does good feedback help us feel great about ourselves, it’s also highly clarifying. If you can’t identify how it’s going, you’ll feel lost and demotivated.
Embrace failure
No human is an island (see above) or a robot (yet) and to err is to be human. There will be setbacks. Some of them will be self-imposed (oops, I just don’t feel like going to the class tonight) and others will be forced upon us (the cat is sick, I can’t make it today). What matters is not that you “failed” but that you pick yourself up and learn from it. What could I do differently next time? Is there something I need to change? Or, quite possible, is there actually anything I could have done?
The final thing to say is that the only certainty in this process is that it will be difficult. Our brains like familiarity. They look for patterns and resist change. So you are attempting to do something that goes against your instincts. But that’s good. That’s where growth happens. So push on and always remember the big why.