How To Make New Years Resolutions Stick

After writing my last post Why New Years Resolutions Fail, Rhonda  asked in the comments field what’s the difference between a New Years resolution and a goal. I’d never stopped to think about it before and to be honest didn’t give it that much thought then because I didn’t think it mattered particularly.

On reflection though I think I was wrong. It’s much more important than I originally thought, because it explains why so many people fail to achieve their New Years Resolutions.

NEW YEARS RESOLUTIONS v GOALS

I made the mistake of telling a woman on Twitter* the other day that I thought her goals were vague and fluffy. I then added insult to injury by saying that what she had wasn’t even a list of goals, but a wish list.

What was the net result of that pleasant interchange you may be wondering? Do you think she was enormously grateful for my sticking my big fat coaching nose in and offering her the benefit of my worldly wisdom? Do you think she thanked me profusely and then tried to hire me for herself and all her friends. Well not quite, no. In fact she obviously thought I was a complete wanker because she immediately ‘unfriended’ me and ignored my comments altogether.

Ok, so maybe I could have been subtler, but c’mon you only have 140 characters on Twitter to get your message across and I needed to be succinct and on point.

The fact is her goals were about as bad as it’s possible to write goals for the reasons I mentioned. They would have made fine NYR’s, but as goals they didn’t just miss the bulls eye they landed in the poor fella’s ass. Before waving me bon voyage with one finger, she pointed out that many of them were in the process of being completed and she was confident in her abilities to do the rest.

I think maybe she thought I was casting doubt on her goal-achieving good name, but it wasn’t anything like that. I understand some people will have poorly written goals and hit them time after time. Whereas other people will have brilliantly written and planned goals and never get off their rear end and do anything about them.

In showing people different options and approaches it simply increases their likelihood of success.

A new years resolution is an intention and not much more. NYR’s of eating more healthily, exercising more or having more money are all well and good, but what do they really, truly, commit you to do differently? And if you don’t do anything differently, what makes you think anything will change?

It’s fair to say that eating an extra apple per week, going to the gym once more per month and finding a nickel on the sidewalk will probably not leave you with that warm fuzzy feeling of satisfaction come New Years eve 2009. Yet all those events satisfy the criteria laid down, so there’s quite obviously something missing.

A NYR is by definition something you resolve to do. It’s a promise to yourself and not much else. There’s nothing wrong with that, and if you’re somebody that is very self-motivated you may even follow through and meet your resolutions, but that is one big IF!

In my experience few people actually are that self-motivated and the fact that many people have usually dropped or forgotten their resolutions on the drunken stagger home form the New Years Eve party reinforces that belief.

MAKING RESOLUTIONS STICK

This got me to thinking how can we make NYR’s stickier (an expression used by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point that I have decided to steal) and have people more likely to succeed?

The glaringly obvious answer based on what I’ve just said is to write goals AND New Years Resolutions down. Ok, I realize that idea isn’t going to have people clamoring for the introduction of a Nobel Prize for Life Coaching so that they can crown me Life Coach King of the World, but as an idea I think it’s got legs.

Just over a year ago I wrote a post called SMARTER Dreams. I talked about working with a client who’s goals couldn’t be tied down to fit in the goal setting model that I designed and prefer to use  To all intents and purposes his goals weren’t goals, they were dreams.

I didn’t want to try and force them to fit a model that would dilute their importance to him, because that could have detrimentally effected his motivation and commitment. Eventually we settled on the stunningly obvious answer of having a goals list and a dreams list.

The dreams could be as nebulous, woolly and visionary as he liked, with the only proviso being that they were inspiring. We then had his goals feeding into the dream list thus making the dreams infinitely more likely to come to fruition.

I talked about the importance of changing our own identity in the last post if we want to make lasting beneficial change. The following day I was tinkering with my own goals and wondering how I could implement some of the stuff I’d spoken about to make them more effective.

I started writing some goals/resolutions with this in mind. I’m going to share a couple with you to show the format I settled on. I have no idea if this is in any way original (quite frankly I doubt it), but I’m not sure that really matters as long as it works.

HELP WITH CHANGING IDENTITY

The main criterion in employing this method is you start to shift the way you perceive yourself. As such the first part that incorporates your name is absolutely critical. Each goal/resolution should start off the same and when you read them back to yourself should include your name in the same way every time.

I’d also recommend following the 3 P’s of Goal Setting method and keep the statements in the positive (i.e. what you want to achieve and not what you don’t) as well as ensuring they are present tense and personal to you.

Here are a couple of mine to give you an idea:

My name is Tim Brownson and I meditate for at least 25 minutes every day.

My name is Tim Brownson and I am always up by 7.00am on workdays

By saying these as statements of fact I am forcing myself to view myself differently. I am saying “This is how it is. This is me and this is what I do” I’m not saying “This is how I’d like it to be, and it’ll probably happen too if only Uranus will slide into line with Pluto rising on a wet Wednesday sometime in late March”

I guess it’s a little bit like the AA approach. By using your name up front you are not only taking personal responsibility for the change, but also reminding your unconscious mind that your new identity now acts in the manner in which you frame the resolution.

This will probably feel weird the first few times, but if you stay patient and stick with it, in time you will start to adapt the new identity and see the changes you want to see.

GO EASY ON YOURSELF

There have been just under 769 million posts written on goals in the last 3 days alone. I have read every single one of them, or at least it feels like that, although it’s probably closer to 15. Some have been ok and some less than ok.

My favorite by some way was the one posted by the always-excellent Havi Brooks at The Fluent Self. Now Havi may have a strange duck fetish going on, but she writes a damn fine blog and knows what she’s talking about when it comes to life coaching stuff.

‘There’s Time’ is a cool post that moves into uber-cool when she starts talking about giving herself time at the end. I’m not going to tell you what she says, just that you should go and read it and then resolve to give yourself more time and accept that you’re always doing the best you can with the tools and information you have to hand.

* If you don’t know, Twitter is a very popular and cool micro-blogging and social networking site. Check it out.