Start your New Year’s Resolution now if you really want to achieve it
“For many of the meaningful endeavours in our lives, the best way to move fast is to go about it slowly, to proceed with a gentle, yet firm persistence.” Brad Stulberg (author of Master of Change)
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September is here, and many of us in the Northern Hemisphere feel as though we are ready to “get back” to some sort of normal routine. The sun, longer days, patios and extra indulgences have all been beautiful ways to enjoy the weather and our time with friends and family, and yet a lot of us feel ready to regain the important goals we have for ourselves. In order to capitalize on the motivation that is present, I would suggest that we all start to move towards a goal we have as soon as we can…but I want us to do it differently than we normally do.
Studies show that nearly 90% of people who set New Year’s Resolutions do not achieve them! Depending on your perspective, this is a fairly sad stat, although it might say more about how we are approaching our resolutions as opposed to what is says about us as individuals.
You see, the key to any successful habit is to build it up over time. This doesn’t jive with most of our psyches as we want what we want when we want it, meaning once we decide on something, we want to go full on towards that. This might be because we have been going in the opposite direction for some amount of time (say a year), or because something has changed within us that’s causing us to want a change (a health scare, as an example).
So how do we do this? What am I prescribing?
Let’s say you have a goal that you want to achieve that involves a change in your behaviour. For example, someone may want to meditate five days per week, or workout four days per week. Great, I love it, but let’s pause before we jump right in. What I want you to do is defer this goal to a future date (it can be January, or even later, depending on the difficulty of the goal). Next, pull out a calendar and do some math. I want you to gradually work your way towards that goal, so that by the time you want to be doing it, you’re already in the habit of it.
If you look at people you know who have some sort of beneficial practice that they consistently do, what is one thing they have in common? In my sample size, the one thing is that they have been doing that thing for a long time! These aren’t people who flip flop from goal to goal. They know what works for them, they have a good reason for doing it, and they’ve built their capacity up over time.
As a real example, let’s say you want to go from zero workouts/walks/meditation sits/etc. per week to four, and you want to be able to sustain that for all of 2025. What would I suggest? I want you to work backwards such that on January 1 you have built up to four workouts/walks/meditation sits/etc. This means that in December, you want to be doing three; November, two, and October one. September can either be used to build up to the one (maybe you’re doing mini-workouts/walks/meditation sits/etc), or you can dive right in.
There are a lot of benefits to this approach, namely:
You have a much higher likelihood of success
You can build up the appropriate muscles/joints and mental grooves rather than get injured and/or frustrated
You will be achieving “micro-goals” along the way, feeding more motivation to keep going
One final point. While it’s great to want to change a bunch of things all at once, I would suggest you stick with just one major one for now. Once you get that established, then you can add more (maybe you want to change your diet, etc.). Our society tends to be an all or nothing mentality, but more often than not that ends up in the nothing category. If your mind doesn’t have the patience for this, try to recall main lesson from the children’s classic The Tortoise and The Hare: “Slow and steady wins the race.” :)
With you on the path,
Joe
