DITCHED THE NEW YEAR REVOLUTIONS?

SET GOALS THAT GET RESULTS IN 2010

If we want to make real change in our lives, we need to move beyond believing in the ‘magic bullet’ of new year resolutions.

As a coach, I’ve achieved most of what I set out to do – except when it comes to keeping New Year resolutions. I still have my written resolution to learn the guitar in 2006 somewhere. It’s probably near the guitar I never learned to play.

And apparently I’m not alone. According to research in the US, only 15 to 20 percent of people achieve what they set out to do on January 1. In terms of strategies, I’d say this one isn’t very effective. And yet every year most of us participate in a ritual that routinely makes us feel like we’re failures.

You see, New Year resolutions don’t take into account how we change. We blindly believe that just by saying it (“Lose weight”, “Stop smoking”, etc) we will make it so on January 1. Our conscious thoughts can be powerful things, but they usually need a little help. When we make New Year Resolutions, we usually make them too vague (”lose weight”, but how much and how?), too negative (”I’m going to stop dating lying bastards like I’ve done the past five years”) and too overwhelming (”I want a hot body, hot partner, fame and a six-month round the world holiday”).

Just to make it harder, we joke about how long our resolutions will last and how spectacularly we will fail at them. Imagine if we treated our big life choices the way we treated our resolutions (”Yeah, I just got into uni; but I’ll probably fail, drop out, end up homeless and with a massive HECS debt”).

Now, don’t get me wrong; I think the beginning of a new year is a fine time to sit down and take stock of where we are in our lives, acknowledge the great things that have happened in the previous 12 months, perhaps give some consideration to how we’d do things differently if faced with some of the choices that gave us grief, and ask the question: What do I really want?

But if you’re really interested in changing some part of your life – and this time you want it to actually happen – then I challenge you to ditch the resolutions and start setting some goals.

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