Summary
New Year’s Eve. It’s a time for champagne, confetti, and, of course, making wild promises to yourself that are often forgotten by the time February rolls around.
Just why is it so hard to maintain commitment to those promises we make to ourselves at midnight? Why is it that we keep going through the same routine year in and year out? We pledge to hit the gym, to drink more water, to save more, to wake up earlier – and yet we quickly hit the wall and get discouraged.
The answer may lie in our approach to making big changes. If we are serious about enacting change in our lives, it’s not enough to make a promise – we must make a plan. And it surely can’t just be an annual event if we hope to reach real progress.
Read on to learn how you can maintain a commitment to self-improvement and growth throughout the year – even if you aren’t watching the ball drop at a party.
Transcript
We all know the drill every time January comes around. The air gets colder, the days seem even shorter, and it’s impossible to get any room to yourself in the gym.
There’s surely nothing wrong with making a commitment around the New Year to get into better shape or to eat healthier or to make a positive life change. It is a natural reflection point to stop at the beginning of a new year to consider what you hope to get out of the next one. As a species we are naturally prone to viewing the coming of a new season (even if you live in a warmer climate) as a reflection point to take stock of where we are headed in our lives. But the problem lies in only having a self-improvement mentality on one holiday a year, followed by a few weeks of rapidly decreasing follow through.
Resolutions Without Teeth
The truth is that New Year’s resolutions rarely represent real or meaningful commitments. They have simply become another tradition to check off of the “to do” list, like popping open the champagne bottle or staying up late to watch the ball drop in Times Square. So have some fun when you are making your vows for the year, but don’t beat yourself up too badly when you fall short of your goal. It is just a party custom, not a meaningful action plan.
Clarity of Your Vision
Setting a real and meaningful vision for action requires taking and planning action long before New Years Eve happens to roll around on the calendar again. It requires having a fleshed out vision in mind of the change you seek, as well as a clearly articulated list of tasks that are oriented toward helping you reach your destination.
The reason these resolutions fail more often that not is that we are not acknowledging our deep, internal desire to not change. As much as we profess to want to be better and chase our goals, many of us are truly content with the status quo if we are really honest with ourselves. As much as we may convince ourselves that we really want to save money or call our grandparents on a more frequent basis, we are coming up against deeply ingrained inertia inside of us that wants to live for today alone. We have developed our default mode of being over time out of habit and it can be enormously disruptive to try to actually change our ways.
Think of an overweight person who commits to going on a crash diet to get in shape in time for beach season. Giving up her normal mode of eating overnight will very likely end the relief that food plays in her life, causing her enormous psychic pain potentially by trying to do too much all at once. We have all likely seen this same pattern play out in people that we care about trying to make drastic changes. The same dynamic plays out with procrastinators, over-drinkers, and others trying to kick a particular vice.
Create a Concrete Plan
In order to enact sustainable and lasting change, you can’t be content to just make a midnight plan or promise to yourself. You need to take the time to take pen to paper and lay out your specific goals, strategies that you have in mind, budget plans if necessary (you may be looking at picking up some training or classes, depending on the nature of your goal), and an implementation plan with a full blueprint of when you expect to meet your goals by.
You are better off always having a full range of goals and objectives that you are working toward rather than the ephemeral and poorly thought out pledges that are typical of resolutions on December 31st. They have been statistically shown by studies to not be carried out more often that not, making them a poor use of your time and mental energy. You are likely better served by focusing on making improvements rather than empty promises. The result of falling short on professed goals is to typically sap away your energy and drive from your goals, making you less likely to follow though on meeting other objectives that you have laid out for your life.
It has been proven that those who set out clearly defined goals, as well as reasonable plans to meeting them, are far more likely to achieve happiness and prosperity in life. This includes clear trend lines correlating goal setting and higher performance. Where these goals differ is that the plans just see January 1st as another day on the calendar – not the end all and be all phase for setting out goals and ambitions.
A good example of the power of setting clear goals can be found in studies in which participants were asked to do as many exercises as they possibly could, such as sit-ups and push-ups. They ultimately fell far short of participants who were given a specific threshold goal to shoot for. The act of setting and striving for a specific metric focuses the mind and keeps it on track to devise the best path for meeting it.
Have Resolve Throughout The Year
Just as we shouldn’t wait for Valentines Day to express our affection to our loved ones or for Thanksgiving to count our blessings, we should not wait for a New Year to lay out our ideas for where we want to go next.
Try to divide up the various areas of your life into different buckets in which you have different goals and aspirations. You might lay out clearly defined goals for your professional career, for your wealth growth strategy, for your health, and for your personal relationships. Wherever possible strive to make the goal something that you can track with some sort of metric or clear measuring unit. This is, of course, a little bit trickier with some goal areas that are focused on more intangible rewards, such as with your relationships – but it can be done. For example, rather than pledging to be a better spouse, you will set a goal of having at least four nice date nights a month with your significant other. Or instead of setting a vague aspiration to be a better father, you will commit to spending at least four hours every weekend taking your children to a recreational or learning opportunity.
In the health arena, you might pledge to get a certain number of hours for sleep each evening (definitely not an easy task for many driven and successful people). For wealth, you might have monthly or annual income targets to ensure that you are continually getting a little bit wealthier with each passing day. For your personal development and growth, you might set out to read a certain number of substantive books in an area of interest.
The impulse to make a New Year’s Resolution certainly comes from a good place – don’t get me wrong. I certainly do not begrudge anyone who sets out to deliberately improve their station in life and use their time in a more effective manner. I simply want to ensure that you are maximizing the power of setting goals and setting yourself up for success, rather than disappointment, by taking the long-view on how hard it can be to actually make a big life change. Remember that all progress comes in incremental steps. By committing yourself to steady and consistent progress each day, you will be far ahead of the New Years crowd in attaining a richer and happier life.
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