How to break your New Year’s resolutions the right way
These days only 30 per cent of Canadians set resolutions for themselves in the New Year. I’m one of them, but my only goal for the year is to eat more fruits and vegetables. Since the beginning of 2016, I’ve developed a serious obsession with homemade baba ghanouj - so far, so good, I guess. Unlike yours truly, more than a third of my fellow resolute Canadians broke the rules they set for themselves on January 1st by mid-month. And by month’s end, half of us officially consider our resolutions broken.
The top resolutions tend to carry over from year-to-year, probably because only 1 in 5 of us manage to lose weight, stop smoking, get fit, or save money. While you might assume that your failure is due to a lack of specific details and failing to turn these resolutions into active daily steps, Victoria, B.C. Life Coach Rebecca Hass thinks the opposite is true. Creating simple habits we can fit into our daily routines is the easy part. What most of us are missing, according to Hass, is our sense of purpose.
“We really do need big, juicy, rich, resonant goals, because if it’s anything less, we’re unmotivated to achieve them,” said Hass in an interview with Yahoo Canada. “If you know what your fuel is, then you are more likely to follow through.”
Making a meaningful change
As Canada’s Top Fitness Professional in 2013 Dave Smith described in the recent Make Your Body Work podcast, “How to Make Resolutions that Actually Work,” the way to succeed at resolutions is to answer one question: how will this improve my life?
“That question alone really drives down, or digs down to that true super motivator, but it doesn’t always happen right away.” Answering this question, why you believe reaching your goal of losing weight or going to the gym or saving money will improve your life, often requires asking yourself why more than once. But, Smith says, it’s worth it. “I challenge you to go through that process. So if you’re setting a resolution, how will it make your life better? […] What is your super motivator?”
Unfortunately, instead of focusing on the long-term goal and the why behind it, we tend get stuck in the unrealistic expectation of never or every day. “We get very concerned with action,” Hass says. “We want to get busy, we want to do and we don’t remember why we want to do it.”
One bad day doesn’t spoil the rest
If your goal was to get fit in the New Year, your first step may have been to commit to going to the gym four days a week. When you sleep in one fateful Friday, even if you don’t have an all-or-nothing attitude in other areas of your life, getting out the door and back to that routine on Monday morning will be doubly difficult. A great number of us would be tempted to quit altogether.
Hass thinks this happens because our hyper-focus on action sets us up for failure. “We’re so hard on ourselves that we just beat ourselves into submission, and we use all of our failures as evidence that we were never going to succeed and we never should have started. Then we quit.”
Instead, she says, we need to respond with kindness and forgiveness. “You want to change your life. You want things to be better, you want your life to be richer, you want to feel healthier, you want to be more social, whatever you chose, it was something that really mattered to the quality of your life, so don’t just abandon it because you had a trip up, you had a bad week, you fell off the wagon for a day on your resolution. Remember why it was important and start fresh the next day… The big, juicy goal you set for yourself is a long-term goal, so it’s not as if three bad days is a sign you were never meant to do it.”
When we know the why behind our goals, Hass doesn’t believe we need resolutions. Instead, we should create meaningful intentions that discourage all-or-nothing thinking. When we’re dedicated to the long-term goal, rather than the short-term plan, we can give ourselves permission to set the bar lower.
“We tend to bite off more than we can chew. Take smaller bites,” says Hass. If going to the gym four days a week is too much, go twice instead. If you feel guilt creeping in, do a shorter workout at home the other two days. Make compromises that allow you to keep your big goal in sight.
We both know it doesn’t matter anymore that you skipped the gym last Friday. What’s done is done. What matters is what you do about it today.
