Keeping Your New Year's Resolution

New Year’s Eve is my favorite holiday! It always has been for me because it represents newness, change, and overall opportunity!  

I recently designed a workshop for an organization on setting goals. As I was working on it, I was thinking of all the goals people are going to set in the next couple weeks as 2017 approaches. Sources such as Forbes and US News tell us that between 80%-92% of people who set New Year’s resolutions fail. That leaves only 8%-20% who succeed at accomplishing their goal. Many people have speculated on the reasons for failure and success. My experience – both personally and as a witness to my coaching clients – tells me that waning motivation is one of the biggest reasons we don’t see our goals through to the finish line. (Another big one is our limiting beliefs. That’s for another day.)

People get excited at the thought of the end result of their goal, so they set it with high hopes. Many believe that if they work hard they will persevere. Sometimes powering through to the end works, and most often it’s not enough. As time passes, we set our sights on other important aspects of our lives, and our original goal gets diluted. It’s suddenly not the most important thing for us to do this year. 

Another big reason is some sort of catastrophe or difficulty that pops up in our life. We get distracted by what’s required to get through it, and we leave behind that which we thought earlier would be the most significant way to move our life forward. This reason is easily accepted because everyone understands tragic circumstances, and we get validated for ignoring our goal. This can be dangerous – what we need most in challenging times is support to keep moving ahead.

So how can we keep our motivation keyed up? I spend a lot of time with my coaching clients getting them to go deeper into their desires. They state what they want - let’s say it’s to lose weight. Great - how much weight? By when? We get more specific with their goal by using the S.M.A.R.T. goal method. Then, the most imperative step in the goal-setting process is having them answer WHY? Why this goal? What will it give them in their life? Most of the time they haven’t thought deeply enough. I’ll get answers like, “because I’m overweight,” or “I want to be healthier,” or “I want to wear that great dress I bought six years ago.”  These are fine responses, and they are not enough. I keep pressing with more questions. Eventually I’ll get to conversations around a deeper desire to be intimate again or a fear of dying before they meet their grandchildren. These reasons are far more likely to keep a person engaged and motivated than the first round of responses. 

The key to success is keeping these longings in the forefront of our minds. I’ll suggest to my clients that they keep some sort of physical representation of the resulting goal with them at all times. This may be a small photo or trinket they can carry in their pocket every day. Or maybe they make their phone wallpaper a photo that reminds them, so they see it all throughout the day. Of course there is a lot more to putting structures in place for people to succeed in meeting their goals; I’m addressing only the motivation piece in this article. So keep setting goals! They stretch us and make us better than if we hadn’t set them. And be sure to get the support you need so you can be really clear about your motivating factors. Happy New Year!