How to Set Better New Year’s Resolutions

It’s that time of the year again. A time where you listen to your Apple Music Replay or your Spotify Wrapped. A time where you watch the TSN top 100 sports plays of the year. It is the end of the old year and with that we welcome in the New Year.

Most people at the beginning of the New Year want to carry out certain resolutions, or they have certain goals that they wish to attain. Come March, we begin to hear the saying ‘New Year’s resolutions are meant to be broken’, and they often are and are forgotten about until it starts to get cold outside again and we keep doing this cycle over and over again. 

Now, I’m not suggesting that no one ever fulfills their New Year’s resolutions or meets the goals that they set out for themselves at the beginning of the New Year -- many people do. However, I am saying that there are better ways to set resolutions and to have goals so that they don't end up broken. Typically, people who are interested in self-help and human behaviour may suggest setting out "SMART" goals. Those are goals that are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely. This is a good system, but requires a lot of work and a lot of motivation that most of us find difficult to maintain. Also, the philosophy behind "SMART" goals is similar to the philosophy behind a lot of psychotherapies such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) or Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT) and similar modalities. The assumption of these ideas is that if you can change the thoughts (cognitions) or feelings of an individual, you can change their behavior, their actions. I believe in this assumption. However, I do not think this assumption is applicable all the time or for every situation.

I believe, instead, that most of the time our actions influence our thoughts and feelings far beyond the inverse. The more we do, the more we think and feel the way we do. The less we do, the more we think and feel the way we do. If you want to run, it matters less how you think and feel about running than actually running. Start running, and then you can think and feel about it. If you don’t run, you’ll think and feel about not running. Sometimes, you just have to do the thing that you want to do. Just do it. 

Okay, so now you’ve started to do the thing that you want to do. Irrespective of how you got there, you are doing what you wanted to do. Now, the second most difficult thing is to maintain it. James Clear, in his phenomenal book Atomic Habits has several strategies on how to maintain doing what you’re doing. He talks about connecting it to your identity, and he talks about creating habits and better habits. If you’re interested in this stuff further, I would recommend giving that a read.

What I find works well is to create a system, to create a culture in which you no longer have to think about doing the thing that you want to do. It has to be part of your lifestyle. If it’s not connected to your lifestyle, you won’t be able to maintain it. You may even go years doing it, but if it’s not integrated into your lifestyle, you simply won’t be able to maintain it. Maintenance, in my view, requires structures to be able to hold the thing that you want to do. What does that look like? Well, if you want to start running - maybe you make friends who are runners, maybe you talk a lot about running, maybe you start following runners on your social media - once you start to do that you can keep running without really thinking or asking yourself how you feel about running. It’s just something you do, amongst all the other things you do.

There’s an individual conversation to be had about how much you can really do, that we can have another time, in another year. Until then, the two big takeaways are:

1. Just do it.

2. Create a lifestyle/culture to maintain what you’re doing.

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