How To Make New Year Resolutions That Will Change Us For The Better?
Forget about focusing on losing weight, eating healthy or hitting the gym.
We are almost there. I cannot wait for 2020 to be over. After a crazy year, it is finally time to open the champagne bottles, for laughter and for New Year resolutions. Because after a quarantine of mainly eating chips and binge-watching Friends on Netflix, we need those resolutions more than ever. Now it is really time to get fit, reach out more often to family and establish some other good habits.
I don’t need to tell you that this is sadly easier said than done. Data shows that 80% of all promising New Year resolutions will be never be achieved.
By the 2nd of January, while we are still recovering from the NYE hangover, we will maybe state (again) that we will never touch another bottle of alcohol. And maybe in the first week of the year, we will start with morning runs. We will maybe hit the gym. Try that healthy salad.
But this will likely fade away in the next few months. And before we realise it, we are that unhealthy, chips eating and snoozing-on-Sunday-morning person again. Before you know it, we are back with our old habits.
Only to write down the same goals exactly 365 days later.
How to change this pattern?
The problem is that we set goals that we think are going to make us happier. Working out three times a week, learning a new language, eating healthier.
However, if we really want to make a lasting change, these goals are not enough. We need to change the way we think about ourselves, we need to change our identity.
The famous speaker Tony Robbins stated:
“The strongest force in the human personality is the need to remain consistent with how we define ourselves.”
How we define ourselves, will directly result in our day-to-day behaviour, which will lead to who we eventually become.
Which means that if you want to stop smoking, don’t focus solely on that. Instead, focus on who you want to become. For example, a healthy, sportive, energetic man. Smoking will not match that identity anymore. And it will be easier to stop.
This may feel like tricking yourself.
And well it is.
Therefore, I would like to propose a small addition. Instead of focusing on who we want to become, I would like to ask you who you already are.
Too often we want to achieve a certain goal because we think that will make us happier. We want to become more muscular, more extroverted, more confident to give presentations, more handsome, funnier. And adapting your identity to achieve those goals will probably help.
The problem is, it will probably not make you happier.
We should not strive to become someone else, we should strive to become more of who we already are. That sounds a bit dreamy, so allow me to explain it better.
I mean that we should do more of the things we already love to do. That will make us happier.
So, before we look forward to the New Year resolutions we want to set, we need to reflect back on we what actually loved to do this year.
How do we discover what we love to do?
I cannot give you a quick how-to guide on what you love to do. Despite the many lists on the internet and Medium, I do not believe we will ever completely understand ourselves. Luckily, because this is what makes life interesting after all.
I created some questions if you are, just like me, struggling with discovering what really makes your heart beat faster, lights your fire and gets you in the flow.
1. When do you forget time?
2. What makes you sincerely happy? What makes you smile?
3. What was your highlight of last week / last month / last year?
4. What did you love doing as a little kid?
What did I find?
I love creation - from writing to (web) design. I love deep conversations with various types of people about complex topics. I love to make others happy and surprise them. I see myself as an optimistic, creative dreamer.
I would advise you to describe your identity as detailed and extensive as possible. It makes it easier when you are setting habits. Habits? Yes, habits.
I would like to rephrase New Year resolutions to New Year habits. Habits are recurring activities you can easily maintain over time without thinking.
How to set up your New Year habits?
By reviewing my year, I discovered I was too often forgetting to do the things I love to do. I forgot about travelling, exploring new places, writing, creating and having deep conversations with others due to my day-to-day activities or other goals.
In my desire to fit in I focused on goals like improving my driving or the way I present. These are definitely nice skills to have, but it isn’t really serving my identity. We should not forget to focus on the habits that do serve our identity.
My identity revolves around creation, service and conversations. So for the upcoming year, I am going to create habits around blogging, photography, reaching out to interesting people, travelling to different places and sharing my thoughts and knowledge.
It will make me grow into the person I would love to become.
But, what about my current bad habits?
How to get rid of the drinking and partying habits? How to start working out? Shouldn’t we also focus on them? Well, yes and no.
I realized for myself that I have the most inspiration early in the morning after a good night of sleep. That means the habit of sleeping late and drinking alcohol simply did not fit in anymore. And therefore, I changed.
When we really want to commit to the best version of ourselves, we have to stick to the new habits for 100%. It is tempting to set an ambition like “I will try to blog as much as possible”. But if we are having a birthday party, if we are not feeling too good or when we don’t have inspiration, we give ourselves a reason to bail out. So a better ambition would be “I will post one new blog every week”.
When we commit 100%, we don’t have to choose, and it will save us energy. And this energy can be used to write better content.
Jocko Willink, former Navy SEAL states it as follows:
“Discipline equals freedom, […] by choosing for discipline, we don’t let our choices be determined by our level of motivation. Which is wise, since motivation comes and goes.”
There are tens of other strategies to make the implementation of your habits easier, besides the 100% rule. I would highly recommend Atomic Habits by James Clear if you want to know more about it.
Disclaimer. Don’t expect that we know exactly who we are and what we should focus on next year. I am still doubting and you probably are too.
It helps me to keep Tim Ferriss’ motto in mind: “Life is one big experiment”.
We should give ourselves time to discover our identity and experiment with various habits. Not only in January, but during the whole year.
So that within 365 days, while enjoying the fireworks and champagne, we can reflect on 2021 and think: “yes, we finally really changed”.
I sincerely wish you that.
