Failure at New Year’s Resolutions? 5 Surprising Ways to Succeed…
Dec 05, 2019
New Year’s Resolutions Fail 92% of the Time. Why?!
There are numerous studies on New Year’s Resolutions that show failure rates ranging from 80%-92%. For those of us who keep trying either the same resolutions (weight loss, etc.) or the same way to implement them, welcome to the “Exercise in Futility Club”. Here is a famous video clip that might help you change, and you may not need to read beyond here. 😊
If you want additional help (we are in the Behavior Change Field) to make 2020 different, read on…
5 STOP IT’s to Increase Your Success Rate
STOP IT #1 - Stop Treating Symptoms Instead of Causes: Over 50% of New Year’s Resolutions (NYR’s) are related to diet, weight loss, etc. Generally, this resolution is more about treating symptoms than causes. In almost all discussions about change in our lives, country or world, we talk about symptoms, not causes because we see symptom issues as easier and faster to address. Unfortunately, all we end up with is pendulum swings back and forth from failure to failure.
One of our clients, Julia, knew what she was doing that increased her weight. Her biggest habit in this area was to come home from work, grab some pre-dinner carbs, eat dinner, and then finish with a carb snack before bed. Some of this behavior happened during the day as well. Our clients commit to New Target Behaviors as part of our Growth Coaching, so we started Julia on the journey to identify the cause of her carb-consuming behavior.
After some digging, the cause of the overeating and seeking the carb highs was the stress she felt from work. There had been many failed attempts at weigh loss already, so it became clear to her that the way to lose the weight was to deal with the cause – stress from work. We helped her commit to one simple behavior change at work that she is implementing today.
During her most recent coaching call, we celebrated the almost immediate stress relief at work. Also, the carb intake reduction had naturally started, so she got two benefits from one simple behavior change which I will describe later.
STOP IT #2 - Stop Picking the Same Resolution: In the case of Julia, she had routinely picked losing weight and exercising as her NYR’s. With her failure approaching 100%, she had little confidence in ever succeeding which hurt her motivation significantly. With your next NYR, pick something different and add the Stop It’s described here to the mix. Julia picked something very different, and her initial and relatively quick success is going to breed more success and confidence which leads us to the next suggestion.
STOP IT #3 – Stop Picking NYR’s Without Fairly Quick Emotional Impact: If you pick something that will take a pretty long time for you to experience positive emotional results, it is going to be harder to succeed. You need a new behavior that has emotional impact soon. Julia, for example, had work stress around last minute dumps of projects on her, lack of clarity of her department’s role, and a culture of little accountability to name a few.
We suggested that she say the following at the end of every single meeting of which she is a participant, “Who is going to do what by when?” Not only is she now showing noticeable leadership and starting to change the culture of her organization, she is addressing directly the issues causing the job stress. When she told me how well it was working already, I could hear her smiling on the phone during our coaching call.
STOP IT #4 – Stop Forgetting About a Prompt: Most people are pretty good about describing the behavior change with its four components – How Often?, How Long?, When?, and Where?. What is often neglected is a prompt. Prompts help you achieve success when there is enough motivation and ease of success with the new behavior. Let’s take reading the Bible as a new behavior. If the four components of the new behavior happen to include reading the Bible first thing in the morning, here is a good prompt for a coffee drinker - every night put the Bible right next to the coffee maker so you see it first thing in the morning. It is a tangible signal of what’s next without having to have your “pre-coffee brain” think.
STOP IT #5 – Stop Doing This Alone: One of our clients wanted to reduce his smartphone use after getting home from work. It was hurting family time, relationships, responsibilities, and frankly his marriage. So, he decided that he would come home from work, go to the bedroom to change his clothes, leave the phone there, and do so for 30 minutes as a starter. He ultimately worked his way to not using his phone at night.
Before he started, he explained to his wife and young son that he wanted to spend more time with them at night instead of being on his phone. A verbal commitment to those impacted makes the commitment more real. He told little Johnny that he wanted his help. Our client wanted Johnny to ask him every night after work if he had left his phone in the bedroom. If the father had brought it to the family room, Johnny would get ice cream after dinner. Not only did Johnny ask every night, usually multiple times, but Johnny was going to be a major beneficiary of his father spending more time with him. Everything else has been improving as well. Simple, immediate impact, and emotional. That’s a great combination, and there are many others available to you.
Conclusion
There are more STOP IT’s… like only thinking in terms of a year, trying too many NYR’s at once (ABSOLUTELY don’t do 6 as the blog graphic shows!!!!), not leaning on the Lord in deep relationship, not allowing for grace when you fail, and more. However, the five we have provided above should improve your success rate substantially leading you to a more God-glorifying life because of your love for and relationship with Him. This blog is just a sampling of what the Unstatus Your Quo® Growth Plan can do for you. Shoot me an email if you would like to bounce a New Year’s Resolution idea off of me. We are here for your success and for God’s glory.
Charlie Haines ([email protected])
