New Year Resolutions that Stick

I love making New Year resolutions! Then again, I would be a strange life coach if I didn't have fun imagining a better life and making resolutions to realize those dreams. Do you enjoy making goals to improve your life? Only 33% of all Americans set goals for their lives. Few of the New Year resolutions are ever achieved. Here are a few simple tips to ensure your New Year resolutions stick...

1. Write your resolutions down. Only 3% of the people that make goals ever write them down.

2. Keep the number of goals low. Try to make between four to seven goals. Out of these, only have one or two truly transformational goals.

3. Share your goals with loved ones that can encourage and challenge you.

4. Keep your resolutions balanced: spiritual, vocational, emotional (love/friendship), and physical (incl. home & money). Some people make all the goals in one area, mostly physical, but life is more than that and they can't concentrate so much energy in one area.

5. Think about how you may monitor your progress. How would you know that you are achieving what you want to achieve? This is one of the most important things to help with self-discipline, but only 1% of the people who make goals, monitor their progress. You usually improve what you measure.

6. Write your resolutions in confident, present-tense, and positive ways. Avoid things like "stop eating chocolate" or it will backfire and you will obsess about chocolate.

7. Finally, know the difference between transformational goals or event goals. Event goals are things like clean and organize the garage, go on retreat, sign up to volunteer at the hospital. Transformational goals are things like changing career or jobs, improving your health, losing weight, or increasing your happiness. First, these take a lot of energy so you want to have one or two of these. Second, they require more thought to understand what the drivers are and how do they fit with the rest of your life.

If you are interested in doing more transformational resolutions you might want to read a series I wrote called Accomplish your goals and realize your dreams. This requires a lot more time, but you may be able to make more significant improvements. The information I provide below is more suitable for a quiet weekend, rather than something you would do in one sitting. Here are the links:

The Process of Making Goals

Live on Purpose

Visualize the Future

Commit

Set Goals

Maximize Character. Without Self-discipline we are fried

Manage Priorities

Best of luck with your New Year resolutions!

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Comments

[Essy]

"6. Write your resolutions in confident, present-tense, and positive ways. Avoid things like "stop eating chocolate" or it will backfire and you will obsess about chocolate."

Ok...I have major trouble putting this one into action. I have food intolerances and need to stay away from certain things...how do I make that positive? I'm already obsessing....

[Hector]

Hi Essy! I guess it depends if you are avoiding something you crave or not. If you are using your self-discipline to avoid a food item you use two distinct functions. One is a monitoring process that constantly scans the environment, including TV commercials, for that item you are avoiding. The second is the operating process that is activated when the monitoring process finds the "forbiden" item. This process works hard at overriding the typical thoughts that follow the craving, like getting up to the fridge and getting that food. This works well, except for one thing... it takes lots of energy!

If you decide you don't need to control the thoughts because, say you already lost 10 lbs, the monitoring process is just as effective and people eat more than before. This is called the rebound effect. Also, if you are trying to self-regulate many things in your life, you get depleted and won't have enough energy to override the urge. If you have a stressful day, or had bad news, or something else bad happened, these things will deplete your resources and you won't be able to override the urges. However, the monitoring process is more of an automatic process, it requires little energy and so it keeps finding these items and giving you those thoughts.

So you radar system works great at alerting you of the things you are trying to avoid, but you don't have enough energy to override. Of course, the healthier you become, the more sleep you get, the less stress you have, the more energy you have and thus the easier it is to override the thoughts.

A better approach is to make intentions that are conditional. If I get hungry I will eat baby carrots. You say that to yourself confidently and in present tense. This trains the brain to make this an automatic response. A habit. Habits don't require much energy.

Does this makes sense? This is based on studies by Dr. Shortt Wegner and others on the suppression of exciting thoughts.

God bless!

[Essy]

Thanks Hector, it does make sense...I especially like the 'conditional intentions'. I usually don't have a plan in place, so I go for the thing that 'calls me' the loudest. Baby steps I guess.