A hitchhikers’s guide to avoiding broken New Year’s resolutions
By: Antonela Mestrovic
Tags: New Year Resolution, Honesty, Change, Social Pressure, Commitment

Well-known truth is that New Year’s resolution fail more often than not. There are several reasons behind it:

1. There is no real understanding of root causes of the problem.

2. They are made under (social) pressure.

3. They are not done in the full honesty to ourselves.

Interestingly enough, this is the same set of reasons why agile retrospectives sometimes result in long unproductive discussions with action points that nobody actually believes in.

So how can we turn it around? Here are the quick tips how to make your end-of-the-year reflection motivating and inspiring. (And maybe your team retrospectives as well as a second step 😊).

1. Dive deep(er)!

Making a true decision is much more than just saying a sentence to yourself. Imagine a big sea monster, that is 30 m long and when it goes to the surface you see only the head. But the head is not the reason why it is so powerful, it is the body, present but not visible under the surface. Or to make a lighter parallel, the decision is like a punch line in the standup comedy. It makes your belly hurt out of laughter, but only when it comes after the joke has been setup — the sentence doesn’t have much power by itself. So in order to have really powerful decision, you need to understand what is driving it.

Photo by Massimo Negrello on Unsplash

I start decision making process with yearly retrospective. I reflect on my year and ask myself things like:

- What did go well? What didn’t go well?

- What would I like to start/stop/continue in the New Year?

- What did I learn, what did I lack, what do I long for?

You can pick any of the set of questions that resonate with you. Take time for yourself and write it on paper. Without judgement, without needing to decide anything. Just come in contact with your experience, exactly how you perceive it at the moment.

After you have done it, look for the patterns, clusters of things that belong together. See what is really the important topic you would like to work on during the next year? Let’s say you take your health, or learning new professional skills or having more active social life.

Before jumping to anything similar to decisions, you need to understand first what contributed to situation in this year. For this, you can use a simple mindmap and map all the factors that were playing part in it.

Spend enough time to really look at it from all the sides. See if some new insights are coming up. And make sure you are still not making any decisions!

2. Understand the WHY.

We are all bathing in social pressure, without even realising it. Thousand of smaller or bigger rules and the ‘ways it should be’ are creeping up on us. The social media, people around you, the advertisements you see online or on the street. They are all carrying very specific message of what does it mean to be successful, loved, beautiful. You can test this by simply taking a pen, writing down I should… and writing all the association that come to your mind, without censoring.

Coming back to your area of focus that you selected in the first step, ask yourself: What do I really want? And also: Why do I truly want it?

Sometimes, you will find yourself wanting things like ‘eating healthy’, ‘spend less time online’ or in my case ‘getting up earlier’ just because there is a general cultural sentiment that it is a ‘good thing to do’. It doesn’t mean that there is nothing valuable in these things and good reason why they are having a desirable status, but that itself is simply not enough to make a sustainable decision. You need to find your personal why. Why does it matter to you? What you want to reach for it for yourself? Until you have very convincing answer to this, there are high chances you will keep on sabotaging yourself — no matter how many times you repeat the decision out loud. This process might take some time. Let it marinate. Allow yourself space to find the true answer to this. When you have it, there will be very gentle but fierce feeling of recognition and truth resonating in the body. You will know it.

Photo by Tolga Ulkan on Unsplash

3. Be utterly honest to yourself.

After you understand what do you want to change, what contributed to having status quo and why is it truly important to you, it is the time for brutal honesty to yourself. Do I really want to do that now? Am I ready to commit? Do I believe I can actually do it? If on any of this the answer is no, you might need to reconsider. Maybe there is something else that needs to be take care of first? Maybe you need to start with something smaller? Maybe you are not sure that you truly want this? Be open to adapt your idea based on this feedback that you got of yourself. As we all know, committing to something that you are not actually planning to do can feel good at that very moment, but usually creates a lot of harm later through shame, guilt and decreased self-confidence. If you feel you are not ready to make a concrete decision on the topic, you can simply create an intention instead. For example: in this year, I am sitting with my unpleasant emotions. Just having the intention and repeating it to yourself in the critical moments can sometimes create an amazing transformation.

Photo by James Scott on Unsplash

So, as a summary: the reason why many of us dislike New Year’s resolutions is that they are shallow, made without understanding the whole problem, impacted by the social pressure and more often than not, deception to ourselves to help us feel better in the short run.

The way to sustainable, heartfelt and committed decision involves looking deeper, finding your why and being honest to yourself. If you do that, you maybe won’t have a decision ready immediately at the beginning of January, but for sure it will be worth it. The beginning of the New Year doesn’t need to be a deadline for making meaningful decision and changes. Trust your own pace, look for the inner wisdom and never, never compromise on honesty to yourself.