It’s hard to believe that yet another year has flown by in a blink. For me it’s been twelve months of new life challenges, new realisations, but also more of the same.
And with the end of Christmas comes the inevitable flood of New Year’s resolution videos and articles. How to stay on track, how to make an achievable goal, and how to not give up. I used to follow every bit of advice out there, and when it didn’t work I’d feel demotivated. Surely I was the problem and just not trying hard enough.
Of course, that was all a load of bull. The problem wasn’t me, but the conventional system and conventional advice I was following.
Get out of the New Year’s trap
Most people are treading the water even harder, desperate to stay afloat and keep their goals in sight. It works for a while, but then they tire out and leave the pool. Maybe next year they’ll try again and dip their toes in the water.
Despite all the advice out there, many of us will give up on our goals by the time January is halfway through. A few weeks into the new year and gyms start to empty, old habits start creeping back in, and willpower vanishes like it never existed.
Until maybe next year when you’ll try again. Until years have flown by and you’ve not achieved anything you set out to do. By then it’s too late. You wish you had lived the life you always wanted to. You wish you had given up smoking sooner. You wish you had formed better connections. You wish you had travelled more.
Don’t let that be you. You can smash your resolutions by doing one simple thing; ditching the concept of New Years resolutions entirely.
That’s right. Ignore all of it!
Leave the 99% of people all doing the same thing and failing at the same time and start to approach your goals differently. Echoing the words of author Patrick McGrath, ‘Don’t try harder, try different’.
The problem with New Year’s resolutions
The first problem is that people make New Year’s resolutions because the start of a new year is a catalyst for change. It feels like a brand new page. A new start. Like when you’d get a fresh new exercise book at school. It would start off immaculate and neat, but by the end of the first week it would be full of crossings out, doodles, eraser marks, and torn out pages.
Once the shiny allure of a ‘new me’ wears out when the work gets hard, resolutions go in the bin like that exercise book paper.
The second problem is that everyone is doing it. And when everybody is doing it you can bet your life it’s a pathway to mediocrity and the misery that comes with it.
When it comes to goals and resolutions, don’t wait for the bongs of Big Ben, or the cracking of fireworks and champagne. Start today. Make every single day one of resolve. It doesn’t matter if you fail because every day is a new start and you build momentum. You form habits and eventually that turns into little wins that lead to the bigger goals.
The next big mistake people make with New Year’s Resolutions is that they’re unconsciously playing into an identity attached to the ego. They’re acting according to the stories they’ve told themselves for most of their lives. ‘I am broken’, ‘I am a smoker’, ‘I am sick’, ‘I am poor’, ‘I am (insert label here)’. This leads to failure because deep down there’s a story attached to a belief about why they’re not worth it or cannot ever be successful.
Many people will fight to the bitter end to defend these stories and identities they’ve become so attached and accustomed to.
This is because it’s painful and hard to kill off an identity once it’s part of the ego, so one keeps feeding the identity with familiar behaviours and thought patterns. To achieve goals and form new behaviours that lead to success would mean the death of those identities. It can be agonising at first to let those labels and identities go, especially if they were keeping you in your comfort zone.
How do I know this? Because I’m coming to terms with this myself.
That being said, beware of the trap of ‘trying’ to be successful. This is because merely ‘trying’ without fully committing can feed the illusion that you’re doing something, when in reality you’re comfortable with where you are, even if it’s causing pain. So you will end up in a never-ending cycle of failure without growth or achievement.
Which leads me to my final point; leave your comfort zone. Let the world see who you really are and let yourself fail over and over until you succeed.
But don’t wait until New Year. Don’t wait until tomorrow. Start today and see every day as a fresh start.