New Year’s Resolutions are a nice idea – they indicate making solid, positive and lasting changes to our lives and how can self improvement be bad? But the bad news is that the vast majority of people that make New Year’s Resolutions just don’t stick to them for longer than a week or so. Here are 4 common reasons why:
1. After A Few Days, You Forget About It
If you’re trying to make lasting and solid changes to your life, you need to stay conscious of the desired changes for as long as it takes for you to get into the new habit that you’re trying to create. On average it takes between 18 and 30 days (depending on the research you read) to form a new habit pattern so it’s fair to say that if you can make it to the end of January without failing, you have a much greater chance of success.
The Fix: Write your resolution(s) down and stick the list somewhere that you will see it every day. If necessary, create multiple copies of the list. Put aside five minutes before you go to bed every night to review the list and keep yourself mentally on track. If you can get through January without quitting or forgetting, you’ll probably make it.
2. The Goal Is Ill Defined
Other than forgetting about the intended goal, there are two other major reasons why the majority of people fail. One of them is not defining the goal(s) well enough. If a goal is to be achieved, you need some way to measure your achievement. A very common example after the over-indulgences of December is “lose weight”
But “lose weight” as a goal is far too ill defined for anybody to know whether they accomplished it or not. How much weight? And by when? A goal without a deadline is just a wish.
Additionally, you have a far greater chance of success if you write down what you are actually going to do in order to lose the weight. If you will diet, what will be the details of the diet and if you will exercise, how and when and for how long?
Somebody who has followed through the entire thought process of exactly how and when they will lose weight has a much greater chance of success than somebody who has casually said they want to lose weight.
The Fix: Think through your goal in your mind and write down exactly what and when you’ll do everything that you need to do in order to realize your goal. The bottom line is defining the goal quantitatively and writing the steps down as if you were explaining to somebody else how they should accomplish your goal.
3. The Goal Is Not Realistic
The other major reason that most people do not stick to New Year’s Resolutions is that they make unrealistic goals. This usually means they jump straight to their dream goal without considering where they are with it right now and the amount of proverbial distance there is between them and their goal.
Not afraid to look stupid, I’ll tell you one of mine from a few years ago: “To make a million pounds”. You may laugh. And I’ll forgive you simply because I can now laugh at myself too.
I failed to realize that it’s a long way from no pounds to a million pounds. I failed to realize just how much a million pounds is. I didn’t do the maths. I didn’t have a workable and practical plan. But hey – I was young, naive and a little bit deluded.
The Fix: Make sure your goal is realistic. This does not necessarily mean “modest” but it means you have some reason believe that your goal can be achieved. There must be a line of logic which can be followed to the likely conclusion that you will reach you goal.
4. A Year Is Too Long
This is one of my greatest gripes with the term “New Year’s Resolution” – the implication that it’s allowed to take a year to reach the goal. For most things, a year is too long a time frame to influence action and leaves the door wide open to procrastination and the delaying of action.
The Fix: For small goals, set a realistic completion date. I can’t tell you exactly how to do this because it depends on the goal. You’ll have to use your own judgement. But for any goal that you think will take you longer than a month, you need to break it down into monthly sub-goals and then review your progress every month. If you have trouble remembering to review, set a reminder on your iPhone or Google Calendar.
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At the end of the day, you will succeed at your New Year’s Resolutions and goal achievement in general proportionally to how serious you are about it and the degree to which you really want the change to happen.
I wish you all the best with your resolutions this year.
