Last updated on January 29th, 2019

Did you make a New Year’s resolution this year? Or have you sworn off making resolutions? If you’re like many people, you may have your sights set on losing ten pounds, writing your novel, running a half marathon, or learning to meditate. As February draws near, I am wondering how your efforts to keep your New Year’s resolutions are going. Are you on track with the resolutions you made? If so, good for you! If you’re not rocking your resolutions, I have some ideas about why that may be and some alternatives to giving up.

Resolutions are a good thing

Despite sometimes getting a bad rap, overall, I believe resolutions are a good thing. They reflect our innate desire to grow, change, and become better versions of ourselves. But if the desire for growth and change comes from a good place, how does this positive instinct go awry, often leading us to give up on our changes, to feel worse about ourselves, and to sometimes avoid setting any goals at all for fear of failing?

When it comes to change, it’s as if we simultaneously have one foot on the gas pedal and one foot on the brakes, as psychologist Robert Kegan puts it. We’re neurologically wired to grow and change, but also to seek safety. From an evolutionary point of view, being slow to change helps us survive. If we could drastically change overnight, we might expose ourselves to great risk. We remember mistakes better than we remember our successes to protect us from making the same mistakes again. Our natural bias towards security makes change much more difficult than we realize.

Changing our behavior also requires effort, attention, planning, all of which are more stressful than going with the flow and staying in our comfort zones. When life adds stress on top of the stress of trying new behaviors, we often default to our favorite ways of soothing our stressed-out nervous system: eating comfort food, having that second glass of wine, or lying on the couch binge-watching Netflix rather than going to the gym.

Four strategies to encourage you

So if you are struggling to keep up with your New Year’s resolutions, cut yourself some slack. Remember that there is no one-size-fits-all strategy for creating changes in your life. That said, let’s address a few strategies you can use to help you make the change you want.
 
1. Start small
We need to start small because willpower is overrated (see BJ Fogg from Stanford on “Tiny Habits”). Pick something small that you can stick to 100% for whatever time frame you choose. You can always re-commit the following week, adjusting your goal if need be. Don’t try something if you are only 50% committed to the change.

2. Cue and reward
Figure out a cue for the new behavior (e.g., while my oatmeal is cooking each morning, I will meditate for 10 minutes) and also a reward for the new behavior (e.g., I get to drink my coffee, eat my oatmeal, and read the newspaper immediately after I meditate). We need to make it easy to do the behavior to give it a chance to become a habit.

3. Identify your fear
Identify the fear that is underneath the change you wish to make. It may sound counterintuitive—of course you want to be successful! Yet there is often a fear (or set of fears) that we associate with success. To unearth that fear, ask yourself, “If I were wildly successful, what is the worst thing that could happen?” For those working towards weight loss, the fear is sometimes, “If I lose weight, I might start dating again, and then I could be rejected.” For those with goals related to writing, the fear may be, “If I finish my novel, people might think I’m a terrible writer, or my book might not get published.” So you see, it often feels safer to try half-heartedly than to allow ourselves to try more effectively and to see what happens next.

4. Get SMART
Once you’ve identified the fears that you associate with success, try holding those fears up to scrutiny. You’ve probably heard of the traditional SMART goal framework; Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, through their “Immunity to Change Model” suggest reworking the acronym. Your SMART goals should be Safe, Modest, Actionable, Research-based, and Test the assumption underlying your fear of success. In Kegan and Lahey’s approach, you should start by trying behaviors associated with a small degree of risk in order to test assumptions. If you want to charge more money for your services, but you fear people will think you are not worth it, increase your fee by a small amount and see what happens. Do people pay the increased fee? Do they question why the fee increased? Do your worst fears happen? Design a low-risk test of your assumptions and learn from the outcome.

When we identify our hidden fears and test our assumptions, these forces stop unconsciously working against us. We can then examine whether the feared outcome is even partially or wholly accurate and keep making incremental changes.

Our tendency to fall down in our efforts to keep our resolutions is entirely rational. However, this doesn’t mean we want to stay stuck or that we can’t change. We instead need to learn to outsmart ourselves and to develop a more sophisticated strategy for change than a simple goal-setting approach. We also need to remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day, and that most sustainable changes happen over time.

Best of luck on your efforts to grow and develop in 2019. I would love to hear how it goes for you!