RETHINKING RESOLUTIONS

It is the time of year again when people boldly commit to a huge range of achievements, dedicated to total reinvention in 12 short months. While I love a commitment AND reinvention, it is a well established fact that most of these resolutions melt sooner than the Wisconsin snow banks. In fact, only two weeks into the new year , over 30% of people have abandoned their commitments. Less than half of our best-intentioned resolutions even make it halfway through the year. *

It is very tempting to use the new calendar year as a catalyst for a “new you”, but it is rarely successful personally or professionally. This year, instead of setting a traditional resolution, understand why they haven’t worked in the past, and set a new type of goal to help solidify your achievements in the next year.

The primary reason why New Year's resolutions, and many goals fail, is because they’re too restrictive too quickly. Imagine your ultimate goal is to be more active. You’re really excited, really committed, so you resolve to exercise every day. You start strong, hitting the gym three days in a row. Day 4 hits, and you haven’t had this amount of exercise in a while, so you’re understandably tired and decide to skip the gym. Already, after one slip up, you have broken your resolution. For some people, that is enough for them to throw in the towel for the entire year. If this infraction doesn’t derail your resolution entirely, it will certainly affect your momentum and confidence in your ability to achieve your overall goals. Think instead how much more you could accomplish if at the end of day 4, you could view your progress as a celebration of being more active, not as a failure to meet your goal. What if instead, our resolutions were more like a theme for the year? A framework to help anchor our decisions and behaviors? What if they led to MORE celebration?  My personal favorite option for creating, and sticking to my “resolutions” throughout the year, is to frame them as a More AND Less list.  There are so many ways that the “more and less” model can support both personal and professional aims. For example, say your business is struggling with online visibility. You could resolve to have more social media posts, more google reviews, more online referrals, even more understanding of SEO, or social media platforms. Maybe you’re working on organization at home, you could resolve to have less clutter corners, less procrastinating organizing tasks, even less stuff that leads to disorganization.

Documenting your resolutions this way is easy. Start by creating  a two-column page, with one being a “More” column and the other as the “Less” column. The concept is simple, your “MORE”  list should have things you want MORE of in the next year, and things you want to diminish, or have LESS to go in the opposite column. 

This method allows you to celebrate wins along the way, and leaves room for a resolution that didn’t get the attention or commitment it needed in January, to still be achieved in March, June or even December. It also allows for flexibility in finding out how to best meet a specific goal. If I add to my list that I want to have more creative hobbies, I have a HUGE window for choosing the right hobby, and priority for my life. If I decide to knit a whole sweater (an actual thing I once had on my resolutions list), I might set myself up for failure, by not realizing that I might totally hate knitting, and therefore completely abandon the resolution before I could even start the project. Furthermore, the  point of the goal wasn’t to have the sweater, it was to engage in more creative hobbies, and my defeat- not making a sweater- stood in my way of pursuing other creative hobbies.  

This reframing doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t set concrete quantifiable goals, you absolutely should. However, those highly empirical goals should support your larger “More and Less” resolutions, so that if one week you don’t hit your goal but are moving in the correct direction, you gain confidence and commitment, not lose it. If you’re committed to having more creative hobbies in your life, you might set a support goal of completing one project in your first month. Even if it takes you two, you’re still meeting your overarching goal, and working in the right direction. From my perspective, moving in the right direction is the BIG goal, and anything that helps us personally or professionally gain momentum in that direction is valuable. 

I would LOVE to help you and your staff create meaningful and achievable MORE AND LESS lists at your next team meeting, or help you design a professional MORE AND LESS list for your overarching business goals, and set smaller concrete goals along the way. Let’s get connected, and plan for what we need more and less of in 2022. No knitting needles, or gym shoes required. 

*https://discoverhappyhabits.com/new-years-resolution-statistics/