Re-Writing Your Success Code: Overcoming things that Doom New Year Resolutions
I know you made a New Year resolution in 2013.
How did your resolution fare? Do you think your 2014 resolution will be
different? I used to make a resolution every year – and, most of the time I
failed to keep them. According to the
available published evidence(see table 1), 88 percent of all New Year
resolutions end in failure.[i] However, after failing to keep my resolutions
many times, I somehow figured out some ways to succeed. From table 1 we can
see that
Table 1 - New Years Resolution Statistics
|
|
Percent
|
|
Percent
of Americans who usually make New Year resolutions
|
45%
|
|
Percent
of Americans who infrequently make New Year resolutions
|
17%
|
|
Percent
of Americans who absolutely never make New Year resolutions
|
38%
|
|
Percent
of people who are successful in achieving their resolutions
|
8%
|
|
Percent
who have infrequent success
|
49%
|
|
Percent
who never succeed and fail on their resolution each year
|
24%
|
Source:
Journal of Clinical Psychology, 2013
So also is
making them in the first place. Having failed many times myself, I decided that
I must find out why I was not successful in keeping my resolutions. What I
discovered was simple: My strategies will never work unless I first know how to
change my behavior. In order words, even if you are using the most awesome, the
most highly rated and the most robust method for keeping a resolution, you will
continue to fail unless you change your behavior. This simple fact helped me to
take my resolutions from 90 percent failure to almost 100 percent success.
What Make New Year Resolutions Flop
Complex Goals
The reasoning here is
simple: When you try to do more than one thing at a time you will decrease your
chances of doing any of them. For instance, let us assume that your plan is to
lose weight in 2014. This resolution will involve a multitude of habit changes – eating less meat, drinking
low-fat milk, exercise, avoiding junk food and soda, and so on. If you are like
most people, you would want to try all
of them and hope they stick. Unfortunately this is where you start to fail:
Trying to make more than one habit changes at once may be too much for you and
will decrease the likelihood that you will make any change. Your best chance of
succeeding in your ultimate goal will occur only when you pick one simple habit
change – say, cutting out soda from your diet – and sticking with it, ignoring
all other efforts to change.[ii] After about 2 months, this change will become
habitual, then you can add another habit change.
Over-Reliance on Will Power
Reminder to everyone:
Willpower is a very limited resource, even though it enables us to deny what we
want now so as to get what we want in the future. Here is a cruel part:
Willpower is not only greatly over-estimated but it wears out easily; it also
recovers slowly and you will always need more of it later. [iii]
To make your willpower work for you in terms of sticking to your resolutions,
it is best to preserve it carefully because it is a limited resource. This you
can do by avoiding temptation as much as you can so that you don’t wear out
your willpower and hence lose control.
Dodge the “Wiggle Room”
You probably messed up
your 2013 resolution because you decided to just “let it slide this time” – an attitude
that can be likened to a slippery slope. From an entirely practical
standpoint, change is easier when it is
all or nothing, in black or white, leaving
no room for sogginess or fudging. The fundamental lesson here is that your mind
can sometimes behave like a wily, spoiled child that will employ all manner of
deceit to get what it wants. Unfortunately, it usually does when temptation comes,
especially when you adopt the “let it
slide this time” attitude. The key to
success therefore is to plan ahead for your weakest moments each day. If
possible, tie yourself to the mast before temptation arrives, regardless of
whether you are strong enough to resist it.
Blind Ambition
Ask ordinary people
what they think of ambition, and they will respond that it is a good thing. What they may not know is
that, while ambition can be a virtue, it
can also set you up for failure, which begets more failure. More important, though, is that most people
tend to overestimate their abilities. But the truth is that unless you start as
small as possible and expand cautiously from there, falling short of your
expectations is highly possible. The oddity is that “shoot for the stars to hit
the moon” is a misplaced metaphor for New Year resolutions, for one simple
reason: You are not aiming, firing, and hoping for the best. Instead, you are
sailing! And as with sailing, what is important is consistency, tracking, and
frequent course corrections. [iv] In
other words, to keep your resolution, you will need a constant, slow-burning
motivation – and not ambition. This is because ambition simply means wishing
that things would change. Motivation, on the other hand, is your reason to
change, which can propel you to positive action and behavior – the actual
change. So for a successful resolution, wanting or ambition will not be enough.
In view of the simple
explanations made above, it can be inferred that the secret of a successful New
Year resolution is to choose one simple, easy and impactful habit change and
stick to it until it becomes a second nature. After that you can add another
behavior change, and so on until you reach your goal. By following this approach you are certain to
do superlatively well with your New Year resolution, and the benefits of your
success can follow you for life.
Notes
[i] Lehrer
J.(2009): Blame It on the Brain. Wall
Street Journal. Retrieved December 31, 2013 from http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748703478704574612052322122442
[ii] Baldassare
A.(n.d.): 11 Reasons New Year Resolutions Fail. Funimalist Retrieved January 1, 2014 from http://www.funimalist.com/11-reasons-new-years-resolutions-fail/
[iii] Ibid
[iv] Ibid
