Many of us began the new decade with resolve to be better, eat healthier, use time more wisely, be more present, save more, earn more, achieve more, experience more. If you are like me, you were full of conviction the first week in January. However, it is my experience as an executive coach, many of us struggle to maintain our conviction. Our habits and triggers surface during inconvenient moments of weakness that may submarine our resolve. A University of Scranton study followed 200 New Year Resolvers over two years. Seventy-seven percent followed through for one week. Only 19% kept their commitments for the entire two years. The sports activity company Strava analyzed data from 800 million user-logged activities in 2019. They discovered most people give up on their goals by January 19th. In fact, January 19th is now known as quitter’s day. And, approximately 80 percent of resolvers have given up by the second week in February. It seems that if you are determined to change, learn grow and improve, the odds are against you. Achieving goals in the face of these odds is all the more motivating and all the more cause for celebration. I have compiled a few tips and techniques that have worked for me and my clients to consistently achieve our goals year after year.
- Increase Your Level of Commitment
The first step to make your resolutions stick is to contemplate how serious you are about making the change. Determine why a specific goal is important to you. Sometimes we set goals that we think others expect us to make. Ben Franklin set several goals to help him achieve “moral perfection” which included: Temperance, Silence, Order, Resolution, Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, and Justice. Someone told him he needed to add Humility to his list, so he did. However, as he looked back on his life, he felt he achieved success in all the areas listed except humility. As he thought about why, he realized it was someone else’s goal, not his. When you are deeply committed to your goals with a clear purpose, your chances of success increases. A great way to commit yourself is to rate your current level of commitment to each goal on scale from 1-10. If your commitment is less than 9, it may be easier to give up. Ask yourself what it would take for you to increase your commitment to 10. Figure out what has the potential to stop you and eliminate it.
- Make Your Goals Easier to Achieve
Secondly, understand that there are going to be barriers to achieving your goals. If the goal is to be a more effective leader and get your team more engaged, set a specific goal for team meetings. Your natural style of leading may be to control the agenda and the conversation. This will not create the most engagement on your team and you may wonder why your team members are mostly silent. Set up a post meeting evaluation. This will get you focused on actions that will help you meet your goal. You may want to ask more questions and let others report on agenda items. Plan to ask questions on your agenda. Listen to all comments without judgment. After the meeting, ask yourself if you did your best to involve and engage your team. Rate yourself on a scale from 1-10 and ask a trusted team member to rate your effort to make sure your evaluation is accurate.
If you have a goal to lose weight, make it easier by not having a lot of fatty foods easily accessible at home. Make it more difficult to break your goal by intentionally limiting unhealthy foods in your environment and making access to good foods very easy. Another goal barrier example is you may find it difficult to make time for exercising so you resolve to get up really early. Then you notice early in the morning when you planned to get up, your resolve weakens. Plan for this phenomenon and figure out how to make it is as easy as possible to keep your commitment. Some suggestions include putting out your exercise gear the night before so you can just climb out of bed and put on your clothes without thinking. This reduces the friction or inertia that can keep you in bed away from your goal activities. Some people even wear their exercise clothes to bed for the easiest transition out of bed. Another suggestion is to make an appointment to meet someone and exercise together. It is easy to cancel an appointment with yourself, yet harder to cancel and appointment with a friend.
- Plan for Setbacks
You will have setbacks in keeping your goal. There are going to be times when you fail to keep your commitments. Maybe you give into temptation and eat that desert, or you sleep in etc. Understand that there’s going to be backsliding. When you understand this, you are less likely to give up even if you have a short-term failure. Short-term failure should not equal elimination of commitment. You don’t have to be perfect at your goal, you just have to keep at it. This means you are more like to achieve your goal in the long-term, even if it might take longer than you originally planned.
- Focus on Goal Activities
It also helps if you focus on the actions and not the goal itself. For example, if you want to be more assertive, think of actions that would demonstrate assertiveness: Speaking up in meetings; letting someone know when they failed to meet a commitment; Be willing to disagree and have conflict. Then measure what you actually did. I keep track of my goals on a daily spread sheet. I ask myself this question for each goal: Did I do my best to… (Speak up in my meetings today), (have difficult conversations), (Address bad behavior), or for a health goal-(eat healthy) Then I rate myself on a scale of 1-10 on how well I kept my goal for the day. This allows me to see trends in my commitment. If I have an average score of 7 for the week on my being more assertive goal, I know I am doing okay but can improve. I can make plans to improve my efforts and challenge myself. Keeping track of your results helps you stay accountable to yourself. If the spreadsheet is too cumbersome, there are many apps available to you to help you measure how you’re doing. Here are 10
Forest: Stay Focused, $1.99, for iOS and Android
Strides, free with in-app purchases, for iOS
Way of Life, free with in-app purchases, for iOS and Android
Fabulous, free with in-app purchases, for iOS and Android
Habit-Bull, free with in-app purchases, for iOS and Android
Loop Habit Tracker, free, for Android
Streaks, $4.99, for iOS
Productive, $6.99, for iOS and Android
Trello, free with in-app purchases, for iOS and Android
LifeRPG, free, for Android
- Have an Accountability Partner
To increase your goal commitment, find an accountability partner that you can report to regularly. This could be a friend that you trust that won’t let you off the hook if you fail to check in. You also want someone who won’t judge you if you fall short. An ideal accountability partner will ask questions about how you are doing and what is holding you back. Report regularly either once a week or once a day with a quick email or text or call. Reward yourself when you do a great job. That doesn’t mean if you’re on a diet that you blow that diet. It does mean have some fun and celebrate when you do a great job. Give yourself a reason to continue your improvements.
Realize that sometimes we get overconfident with our ability to change. We create resolutions and goals thinking because we have decided to change, it will happen. We forget to consider our habits and patterns that have created our current conditions. Part of the preparation necessary to overcome these habits is to be humble and note that change is difficult. Be willing to give yourself a little bit of grace when you fall short and stick with your plans in 2020.
May you achieve your happiness goals! May you achieve your success goals! May you choose your health goals, your relationship goals, your financial goals, or whatever goal is important to you. Success to you!
The Author Spencer Horn is the President of Altium Leadership For additional information consider the following topics: “Act As If…Today”, “Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired;” “The Power of Accountability;” “Silence Your Saboteur” “The Help You Need To Achieve Your Resolutions” Seven Success Strategies For 2018
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