Over 24 million. I’m not particularly surprised. Coaches and lifestyle guru’s right around the world are espousing the need to make ‘realistic’ resolutions and offering all kinds of ways to stay on track with them. Not me. Let’s face it — it’s pretty pointless waiting all year to decide on one or two things that you kinda, sorta want to stop doing, but that you know full well you’re not really committed to following through with anyway. How crazy is that? Resolutions don’t work for 4 reasons.
1. They’re all about what you think you should do.
Stop smoking? Start exercising? Eat healthily? More work/life balance? These all sound good on the surface, but typically a resolution is based on what you think you should be doing, rather than what you really want to be doing. Too often, resolutions are decided upon by looking at other peoples expectations or by reading a magazine that tells you how to ‘get fit by summer’. Nonsense – forget about what you or other people think you ought to be doing and look at what you really want.
2. Resolutions are like goals.
Some resolutions are like goals in that they’re about getting more of something. The trouble is that goals – which have been pushed down our necks by the self-help industry for at least the last 20 years – rarely work. The problem is that as soon as you set yourself a goal you’re saying to yourself that you want more in your life than you have right now. The very nature of goals make you look forwards at what’s next, never at what you’ve got right now. Goals have the tendency to make you feel less-than, because there’s something you don’t have now that you aspire to have in the future. Goals introduce a gap between where you are and where you’d like to be, which instantly makes part of where you are right now a place you don’t want to be – and this is how the very nature of having goals can hurt your self-confidence and self-esteem Most people tend to think they need to set themselves goals and objectives to see things happen, but that’s missing the point. Show me a goal-hungry person and I’ll show you someone who’s always wanting something better to come along, someone who’s convinced – albeit perhaps not consciously – that reaching their goals will lead to their happiness. Even if that person reaches a goal it’s all too likely that it lacks meaning and personal relevance, and so the hunt for meaning, relevance and happiness goes on. Once you reach a goal, what’s next? Gotta have another goal. Then another, then another. When do you get to stop and just enjoy life right where you are? The real gold and real value is in the experience, NOT in the end result.
3. There’s no motivation or commitment.
Over a third of resolutions don’t make it past January and over three quarters are abandoned soon after. The reason? No commitment. The problem is that you’re taking something that doesn’t mean anything to you and trying to make it happen. Resolutions lack a foundation of meaning and personal relevance that makes sure they run out of steam. Sure, you might get an initial burst of motivation that gets you started, but that never lasts. Motivation is like the big rocket boosters on the space shuttle – it gives you an initial spurt of energy to get up and get moving, but it’s just not sustainable. What you need is something more fundamental, more central and more important to you. What you need is something that comes from the inside, something that’s based on what’s important and what matters to you. That’s the only way to get behind it, have confidence in it and keep the motivation and commitment going.
4. The timing’s all wrong.
Not only are you coming off the back of the holidays and getting back to the harsh realities of the world, but you see the whole of the year stretching ahead of you and summer’s a whole 6 months away. It’s not exactly an inspiring picture, is it? And what kind of person waits all year to make a choice about something anyway? Why wait for one particular day to make a decision, when there are 364 other equally great decision-making days available to you?
So forget about making New Years Resolutions.
Living a full life isn’t about making some woolly, half-hearted decisions that don’t really mean anything. That’s not what truly confident people do. Instead, make confident choices based on what really matters to you, and jump in with both feet. Featured photo credit: Josh Boot via unsplash.com
