Photo by Cathryn Lavery on Unsplash
If you’re like 80% of people, you are probably on the brink of giving up on your New Year’s resolutions by the time February comes. This is according to clinical psychologist Joseph Luciani, Ph.D., in his article, “Why 80 Percent of New Year’s Resolutions Fail.” 1 Referring to mostly fitness goals, he attributed the failure of keeping New Year’s resolutions to “holiday remorse” – the remorse of disappointment from being unable to keep guilt-driven goals from holiday indulgence. He points out that “… outside-in solutions as dieting, joining gyms and so on are doomed to fail if, other than your well-intention resolve to change, you’ve done nothing to enhance your capacity to either sustain motivation or handle the inevitable stress and discomfort involved in change.” In other words, to pursue any lasting change, we need to change our minds first! He attributes our tendency towards self-sabotage to a lack of self-discipline, and makes recommendations on how we can exercise our self-discipline muscle throughout the year – one of which is to make small things happen. Read his other recommendations here.
This personally struck a chord with me. After I underwent the MERIT Profile Assessment 2 to assess my character competencies that impact both my work and life, I learned that one of my “development areas” (areas to strengthen) is called “Make Things Happen”. Another is called “Stay the Course”. From Ron Jenson’s book, Achieving Authentic Success (upon which the MERIT Profile was based), I learned that if “staying the course” is about persevering until you finish your work and meet your goals, “making things happen” is having the discipline to adjust your life on a daily basis and building bite-sized, daily habits in order to meet your goals. In other words, it is not enough to just set goals; you need to decide how that’s going to look like on a daily basis and what adjustments you need to make in order to move closer to your goal each day.
Break down your annual goals into measurable bites in terms of smaller-sized goals and daily activities to reach them. For example, if your year-long goal is to lose 30 pounds, what would your monthly goals be? Weekly? Daily? What would that mean in terms of daily calorie count, and thereby, the food you choose to eat each day? What would that mean in terms of the calorie-burning efforts you will engage in every day, and your daily, weekly and monthly goals in this regard? Write these smaller bites of goals and activities down, and work them into your daily calendar. Ticking off your daily list (especially if you’re a lists kind of person) will give you a certain level of satisfaction.
Now what about sustaining your change efforts? Picking my husband Boris’s brain one time on his ideas about change, I learned that there are various areas involved: change in your knowledge, attitudes, behavior, and relationships. The more areas of your life are involved in your change efforts, the better your potential for success in sustaining change. It begins with your knowledge. You need to know why you’re doing what you’re doing, and your attitude would be about recognizing the necessity for change. This is where a definition of self-discipline I learned from Ron Jenson made a lasting impact on me: Self-discipline is the ability to regulate conduct by principle and judgment rather than impulse, desire or custom. You can regulate your conduct as a matter of principle and judgment. You have more potential to sustain change if you are driven by principle, than if you are carried along by impulse. And as human beings, we are capable of choosing to be directed by conviction informed by knowledge, rather than just by what we feel at the moment. This will help us be sustained in our motivation, and even overcome hurdles, in order to pursue change. We can choose to make things happen every day — rather than just let things happen to us – until we meet our bigger goals.
1 health.usnews.com, published Dec. 29, 2015.
2 The MERIT Profile Assessment measures four behavior trait tendencies and 10 character competencies summarized into the acronym MAXIMIZERS. MERIT is available through Breakthrough Leadership Management Consultancy, Inc. If interested, call (02) 813-2703.
Michelle Joaquin is the editor-in-chief of Familywise Asia and is wife to Boris and mom to daughters Ysobel, 18, and Julia, 12.
