It's a week into 2025. How are your resolutions going?
It’s likely after a week you’ll still be on track – research from 2012 found that 75% of us who make resolutions are successful seven days in, but by the six month mark, this has dropped to around just 4 in 10 of us. So how do you stick to your resolutions, even when others are falling by the wayside?
Goal-setting is much more complex than it looks; much more complex even than the SMART method you’ve probably heard about (and which doesn’t work for a lot of big, life-changing goals). There are a lot of subconscious and emotional factors which go into setting, maintaining and achieving goals – including new year’s resolutions – some of which directly contradict each other.
In 1981, researchers identified participants performed better in 90% of their studies when they had specific and challenging goals, compared to easy or no goals. Challenging goals can help encourage high performance. But 15 years later, the same researchers found significant levels of poor performance in studies involving participants with a challenging goal who were intimidated by the goal’s level. So challenging goals can also encourage poor performance if they’re not pitched right.
The research goes against much self-development industry discourse, where clients are routinely told to “set a goal, then double it” especially when it comes to making money. The logic makes sense: if you aim for £50k, but only make £30k, it’s still a greater achievement than your original goal of £25k. However, this is not a sustainable strategy; setting a goal which is double your original intention is intimidating, risking poor performance and an exhausting journey to get to the end result.
But how do you know what’s a challenging goal, and what’s a too-challenging goal? How do you know what you can achieve before you’ve achieved it?
You don’t. You have to fail at achieving a goal before you know that goal is too difficult for you right now, and even if what you achieve in that failure is wonderful, it’s still going to create a feeling of failure. And that’s why I think many people just don’t bother setting goals. The discomfort of failing (even at an intimidating, unachievable goal) is worse than the discomfort of not setting any goal at all, and everything plodding along as it is.
One way of ensuring you stick to your new year resolutions is having your ‘Top Tier’ goal and your ‘Absolute Minimum’ goal. Perhaps you want to go for an hour’s walk outside every day in 2025. Your Top Tier goal is 60 minutes in the fresh air; the Absolute Minimum is 30 minutes, or even 15. While I’m sure some in the self-development industry would scoff at this ‘lazy’ approach, I pride myself not on being a boot camp coach but a real life, everyday coach, and something is better than nothing, especially when trying to sustain a new daily habit in the face of chronic pain, hormonal changes, mental ill health, or other challenges.
There are two other bits of goal-setting research I think are quite interesting in the aim to stick to new year resolutions. First is the commitment you make to others about your goal, which can be a deciding factor in whether you achieve it (or not). This is why many productivity gurus will tell you to tell other people about what you’re doing, find accountability buddies or even join their very expensive mastermind. I know a significant part of my role as a coach is the important task of keeping my clients on task because I am the one they have told about their dreams and goals. However, much of the power of this factor of telling others comes from guilt: the secret social obligation you feel to others to show up, keep going, ‘do your homework’ as one of my clients puts it. Guilt is not an emotion that can sustain positive behaviours in the long term and instead will have a negative effect on your body and mind.
What’s key here is who you tell, why you are telling them, and what their attitude to your resolutions – and goals in general – truly are. Tell your social media following that you’re dedicated to journalling in 2025, and it’s unlikely one of them will message you asking to see what you’ve written. Tell your overbearing mother than you’re committed to losing weight this year, and she will definitely be requesting a weigh in more often than you’d like. Neither of these are particularly helpful or loving, even with the best of intentions.
Therefore another way of sticking to your new year resolutions is to tell the right people, those who are going to cheer you on and keep you passionate. That might be people with similar goals, people who are truly dedicated to your growth and expansion, or even someone who isn’t ‘here’ but would love what you are doing: a deceased family member, a Future Self, an Inner Child who is radiantly committed to your wellbeing.
The second bit of interesting research is on goal proximity: how soon your intention needs to be made manifest, otherwise known as ‘the deadline effect’. A goal that’s challenging with a tight deadline could spiral you into overwhelm, while a goal that’s very achievable within a longer time frame could cause procrastination. Picking the proximity for your intentions to become real is a very personal process, especially as we all understand time differently (with some of us neurodiverse folks having a particularly elastic comprehension of time). There’s also the adage that we overestimate what we can do in a year, and underestimate what we can do in five; very relevant to new year resolutions which have a 12-month expiry date implicitly baked in.
Getting the proximity right is something I’ve experienced first-hand as a recovering plan-a-holic. At one point I made myself a five-year plan with some extremely lofty goals in it, and proceeded to achieve many of those goals within just 12 months. And I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t feel the excitement, or thrill, or any of the things I thought I was going to feel by ‘smashing’ my goals. I just felt a bit tired, overwhelmed, and empty: “What now?” I remember thinking.
Because that’s one of the secret purposes of setting intentions and having new year resolutions. It’s not to achieve them; it’s to enjoy the process of achieving them. It’s to use your life’s precious moments meaningfully and wisely, not to feel that you are squandering them, but also not to feel rushed or so accomplished that you don’t know what to do next. You wouldn’t want to wolf down a delicious meal in a couple of bites, so why do the same with your lifetime’s achievements? There’s a pleasant ease that comes with finding the right goal proximity for you; not to pressure yourself into meeting an arbitrary deadline, but to give yourself the luxury of a whole week, month or year focused on something you truly care about.
Which brings me to the real gem of how to stick to your new year resolutions, even when others around you have given up on them. I don’t know if you got the memo, but this is meant to be fun. It’s meant to be enjoyable to grow, to change, to develop and do new things in life. If your new year resolutions are all about the un-fun – the tired, the sad, the boring, the guilty, the ‘meh’ of life – then you will not stick to them. But if they are about the fun, the joy, the energy, and the boldness, then you are much more likely to keep going.
Goal-setting research describes these two types of goals in a slightly more academic way: learning goals - where you are exploring and developing knowledge - and performance goals, where you must achieve something definitive. When it comes to complex tasks – those big, life-changing intentions I mentioned in the introduction – setting SMART goals or trying to define the final outcome can actually inhibit your performance. Why? You become so tightly obsessed on achieving that narrow definitive result that your creativity, lateral thinking and ingenuity flies out the window and so does your ability to make your intention manifest in ways that could be easier, swifter or more enjoyable.
So give yourself some grace. Set an Absolute Minimum and a Top Tier goal. Tell others who are committed to your growth, even if those people are imaginary. If you want a deadline, be generous with yourself so you can enjoy the process. And most of all, make your resolutions fun. Make them beautiful and glorious. Get your emotional landscape and your soul on board with resolutions that feel wonderful, and you will stick to them.
Now, from listening to this episode you’re probably reflecting on your own goals and new year resolutions, and wondering whether they’re quite the right fit for the next 12 months. For me, articulating your goals so they are spot on for what you want to achieve – and importantly how you want to feel – is as important as the actions you take to work on those goals.
That’s why I’m hosting an online workshop titled “Writing New Year Resolutions so They Actually Stick” where I’ll guide you on the ideal phrasing, structure, language & 'memorability' for your personal goals so you’ll stick to them for the whole of the year, not just a few weeks.
The workshop is on Monday 20 January at 7:30pm UK time and you can register to join me live via the button below. See you there!
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