It’s that time of year again. People all over the world will set new goals for themselves and their lives, and by February most of those goals will be abandoned. In fact, if you go to the gym on a regular basis, you’ll see this firsthand. Tons of new people will start showing up in January, and the gym will get crowded and busy. Just stick it out, because in a month (two at most) all those extra people will be gone and you’ll have the place to yourself again.
photo by {link:https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/9M6i5u60qDHsuLCZE8kbFtMTjNZETYmyPJy0liipFm0}Times Square Public Art{/link}
I don’t need to tell most of you why this is the case. There are loads of reasons why people make and break New Year’s Resolutions – the primary one being that most people don’t know how to effectively set goals for themselves. I guess the real question is this – if we always break our New Year’s Resolutions, year after year, why do we bother making them in the first place?
And perhaps even more importantly, SHOULD we bother making them?
The Goals We Set and Abandon
You can read all over the internet for ways to help you keep your resolutions, and most of that advice is going to boil down to what I already said - practice effective goal-setting. You can also read all over the internet what the most common New Year’s Resolutions are and get some specific advice on how to keep each one. These include:
- Lose Weight/Get Healthy
- Get Out of Debt/Save Money
- Learn Something New
- Spend More Time With Family
That’s what we’re going to talk about here.
All of those above are worthy goals, and probably some things that all of us could benefit from – even the healthiest, debt-free, and adventurous family man. And we set these goals for exactly that reason. They’re good for us, and if we achieve them, we’ll likely be healthier, happier, better people for it. The problem is, few of us actually act on our resolutions once we set them, or we give up on them quickly.
Yet we make them every year. Some of us make the same resolution every year without actually making any progress on it during the previous year. And some of us make all of those resolutions every year, with no plan at all to achieve them, and get unbelievably overwhelmed the first time we sit down to think about starting on them them. Why?
For the same reason we made the resolution the first time – we really do mean it. It’s something we want to accomplish or change about ourselves, and we think this time we’ll get it right. It’s the optimism in all of us that tells us to make our resolutions, even after previous years of failure.
It’s not our ambition that kills the resolutions, it’s poor execution of our plans.
But what’s the point?
This may seem like a strange question. Why make resolutions that we’re not going to keep? What good is it to set and fail at goals, year after year?
First, it gives you a chance to take a good, hard look at the previous year and evaluate it in terms of your priorities. Maybe spending time with your family is really important to you, and you find by looking back at the year that you spent too much time on the computer and not enough playing with your kids. Or maybe being healthy is a big priority for you, but you look back and see that your eating habits have gone down the proverbial shitter over the last few months.
Second, it gives you a chance to reevaluate your priorities altogether. Maybe being healthy wasn’t on your list of important things in your life. Maybe you’ve always been reasonably healthy and never needed to pay close attention to it. But now you’ve found at the end of the year that you don’t feel as energetic as you used to – it’s a good time to shift your focus and make your health something that gets more attention than it used to.
You can do these things any time of the year, though. What’s so special and beneficial about doing it at New Year’s?
It’s a Group Effort
New Year’s resolutions are rarely something that you come up with alone at your desk and make quiet plans about. You talk about them with your family and friends during the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and usually the following week as well. You talk about them with the people at the New Year’s party you go to.
photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikebaird/3539161615/in/photostream/}Mike Baird{/link}
You get to see what other people find important to them and what they plan to do about it, and if you have similar goals you sometimes make plans with them to meet those goals together. You find workout buddies and people to diet with you, find other people you know to sign up for a cooking class with you, and get advice from people who made these same resolutions last year.
In fact, this group effort towards common goals makes it more likely that you’ll actually follow through on your goals. Your workout buddy can come give you a kick in the ass when you try to back out of going to the gym with them, you can guilt trip your friend who says he doesn’t have time to go to class with you after all, and you can keep each other from cheating on your diets.
Maybe you don’t lose the 50 pounds you were hoping for, maybe you still don’t cook more than two meals a week at home, and maybe you only go to the gym a handful of times before you’re back to staring at the TV every night instead. That’s okay. Because you’re still paying more attention to how you’re eating, you’re still saving money and eating a little healthier by cooking a couple times a week at home, and you’re still a little more fit for having gone to the gym a few times.
Besides, the fact that you signed up for a year at the gym (and are paying monthly whether you go or not) means you’ll probably go at least a few more times out of guilt or boredom.
The goals aren’t as important as the process.
What about you? Got any New Year’s resolutions or tips on keeping them? Any fun stories about resolutions going horribly wrong? Any really unique goals for the new year?
Happy New Year!
photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/foxypar4/2153422313/}John Haslam{/link}
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I resolve to work on an ambulance for more than 4 weeks without getting fired.
LOL I like that. Good luck! In the same spirit, I resolve to stay at the same job for longer than 12 months. Should be easier this time since I don’t HATE this job.