A Strategy for Successful New Year’s Resolutions
By: David Schary
Tags: Values, Self Improvement, Goals, Habits, New Year Resolution

A Strategy for Successful New Year’s Resolutions

Photo by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels

A little over 188 million Americans plan to make a New Year’s resolution for 2021. That’s over half of the population! So if you aren’t planning to make one, chances are you know someone who will. The most popular resolutions are health-related. People have ambitions to exercise more, eat less, and lose weight.

These resolutions are well intentioned — who doesn’t want to live a healthier life? But they will likely fail. That might sound harsh, but it’s supported by the data. Research shows only a dismal 4 to 8 percent of people achieve their resolutions.

Why Do We Fail?

My bet is you’re not surprised by the low numbers. And a lot of people avoid making resolutions because of it. Interestingly, some people make resolutions even though they know they’re going to fail. This is not a small group. An estimated 23.1 million Americans, or just over 12% of those who will make a resolution this year, admit they will be unable to keep their resolutions but they still make them.

There is no shortage of reasons explaining why so many people fail. And there is plenty of good advice for how to be successful. Yet, it doesn’t seem to help. The failure rate remains consistent year to year. If we know the problem, and we know how to fix it, what’s going on?

The problem is most of the advice focuses on the wrong things. The standard advice says people fail because their New Year’s resolutions are unrealistic. Most will also give strategies for how to create better, more realistic resolutions. Again, this is not wrong per se, but it is treating the symptoms instead of the disease.

It is true that unrealistic resolutions set you up for failure, and it is necessary to know how to make realistic resolutions. But that is not the core problem, it is just the visible result of the problem. People still quit reasonable resolutions. The real reason is much deeper, it extends down to the core of who you are as a person.

The reason New Year’s resolutions fail at such a high rate is because they are disconnected from people’s values.

Values vs Goals

To understand this argument, lets start with some definitions. According to the Oxford Dictionary, values are “a person’s principles or standards of behavior; one’s judgment of what is important in life.” In other words, values are your internal compass directing you through life. They help you make sense of the world, providing context to what is right and wrong. Some common values are honesty, kindness, and respect.

New Year’s resolutions are goals, they are something that we want to attain to better our lives. Oxford defines goals as the “objects of a person’s ambition or effort; an aim or desired result.” Goals are the destination, where you want to go in life. They can be short- or long-term, easy or difficult. For example, a goal can be running a marathon, losing 10 pounds, or learning to play the guitar.

Regardless of the type of goal, you work to achieve it. And once you’re successful, nothing can undue it, it can’t be taken back. When you complete a marathon, it’s a fact that no one can take away. You can check it off your bucket list.

Rootless, Surface-Level Goals

Values differ from goals in some significant ways. First, you can’t complete a value or check it off a list. Honesty is never finished, you can be honest one minute and dishonest the next.

But perhaps more important to this argument, a value by definition is something that is important to you. Every action you make is connected back to a value, whether you recognize it or not. Goals, on the other hand, may not always be important to you. And by important, I mean down-in-the-core-of-your-being important.

You probably make goals that do not resonate with your core being more often than you think. For example, running a marathon because your friend convinced you it’d be fun. Wanting to lose 10 pounds because you think it’ll make you more attractive. Volunteering to collect donations for your kid’s school because no one else will do it. Goals like these may be important to you on a superficial level, but to have a high likelihood of success, they need to be connected to something deep down in the core of your being.

New Year’s resolutions that fail (…and any goal for that matter) fall into this “important, but not really important” category. As a result, they lack the roots that extend down into what is most important to you. This makes it easy to walk away when things get hard. So unless running a marathon is connected to an important value, it will be hard to muster the motivation to complete a 15 mile training run on a rainy Sunday morning. It’s will be much more enticing to sleep in.

By focusing only on superficial, surface-level goals for your resolutions, and not on your values, you risk trying to improve something that may not be that important to you in the first place. This is a type of extrinsic motivation and it is not sustainable. You are setting yourself up for failure.

Find Your Values

How can you be successful? The first step to achieving your New Year’s resolutions is identifying your values. Once you know your values, you can connect your resolutions to them. Anchoring resolutions to your values will shift your motivation from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation, giving you tenacity to push through and overcome barriers that will inevitably pop up.

Although every decision you make is connected to a value you hold, identifying your values is not something we do everyday. It takes time to sit and reflect on what is truly important to you. So if you have not done an exercise like this before, here are a few suggested steps to get you started:

Begin by writing down your values. If you need help thinking of values, this is a good list with over 200 different values to get you started.

Now it is time to prioritize them. Look back over your list and star those that are most important to you. Whittle the list down to three to five that you can focus on.

Use these values as your internal compass to make decisions about what resolutions are appropriate for you. For example, if you value discipline, starting a regular morning workout routine may be a good fit. However, if you value spontaneity, you will likely not succeed with a structured exercise routine.

If you find that your resolution is not connected to your values, then you either need to change your resolution or be more honest with yourself about what you value (and repeat the first two steps).

Finally, be sure to reflect on a regular basis because while values are stable, they can change, especially if you experience a life changing event (e.g., marriage, new job or loss of job, birth of a child, serious illness).

The time you take to learn and prioritize your values will pay dividends all year long. But it is still not a panacea. Achieving your resolutions will still be hard, difficulties will come and you will be tempted to quit. And while there is no guarantee you will be successful, knowing that your resolutions are anchored to something deep down in the core of your being should be just enough to help you push through to the end.