My name is Thao. I’m a professional financial planner, and every year I hear people tell me about their resolutions for the new year.
My best advice is to forget those new year’s resolutions. Yes, please toss them into the trash!
I’m sure you already know about the success rate of these resolutions in your own life. How many of us resolved “to work out 3 days/week and meditate every day for 15 minutes” and either find yourself never starting, or having started, worked on it for a week or a month then quit?
Depending on where you do your research, 80-90 percent of new year resolutions fail. This means that 8-9 out of your 10 new habits will soon collapse and you will fall back into your old habits once again.
When you failed to keep your own resolutions, was it because you were lazy, or your will power wasn’t strong enough?
I don’t think so. Ask yourself why (pre pandemic), you can wake up every morning, turn on auto pilot, get ready, eat breakfast, pack up the kids, drop them off at school, then drive to work without even thinking about it. You may not enjoy the work, you may hate seeing certain coworkers, and yet you were still able to carry through those daily activities, which are certainly more challenging than taking 15 minutes a day to meditate.
You follow those routines because you need to provide for yourself and your family, because your kids need the education to be good human beings.
You see? BECAUSE you NEED certain “life changing” outcomes. It’s the Why/Because that you need to focus on, not the actions or the habits themselves. If you work out just simply because you want to look good like a certain Instagram influencer, good luck with maintaining your goal.
How would you rate the achievement rate of that goal versus this: “my doctor told me I have cholesterol. I am shocked, I want to have a healthy and quality life. I don’t want to be on the sick bed later on. I want to take control of my health and wellness. I decided to change to a healthier lifestyle so that I can and enjoy a quality life and sustain through time. I need to be healthy for my kids and be a shoulder for my family to lean on.”
Can you see the difference? But here’s the important realization: you don’t have to wait until your life is threatened to take control of your life habits.
To make deep changes in your life, ask yourself what do you value most in life. What are the components that make your life so great, and what else do you need to make it better? Focus on values, which are your WHY drives for you to take action to get closer to your goals.
A lifestyle is not an outcome, or one-time success. It is a journey. For this reason, all of your energy should go into building better rituals, not chasing better results.
Rituals are what turn behaviors into habits. If you want to get better/healthier, then pick a small, non-intimidating, and manageable thing to start like:
- 5 push-ups a day
- Reduce from daily coffee to coffee on workdays only
- Read 2 pages every night before bed
- Deep breathing 1 minute a day
Then every day just try to increase each of the items above by 1% more than the previous day, so that in 2 weeks, you would be able to do:
- 10 push-ups a day
- Half cup/shot of coffee on weekdays, no coffee on weekends
- Read 4 pages before bed every night
- Meditate 5 minutes a day.
I hope you get the idea! Focus on your WHY, and pick the remarkably small habit to start with, then increase by just 1% every time so that you don’t require much will power to start, feel accomplished to finish, happy to stick with and keep on improving. The small little changes add up. The little changes in your actions will become rituals, then rituals become your lifestyle, and that would lead to remarkable results as an outcome.
What are some other reasons why you failed your new year resolutions? If you have any suggestions on what we can do to make the positive change more achievable, please leave comments.
📚 suggestion on habits:
- BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits
- James Clear’s Atomic Habits
- Charles Duhigg’s the Power of Habit
- Stephen Covey’s the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
- Gary Keller and Jay Papasan’s the One Thing
- And many more