New Year, new plans

"We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched.  Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives... not looking for flaws, but for potential. ~ Ellen Goodman

The new calendar year is a good time to set new plans / goals of your own in motion; you know, take advantage of the momentum created by everyone thinking, talking, and doing the same thing. Of course, when other appropriate times for reevaluation come up (more on this over the next several months), putting things off UNTIL the new year is just making excuses and giving in to fear or complacency.

As promised, today and tomorrow I'm going to drop in here an article (in two parts) I wrote for my company newsletter. It's pretty standard goal-setting information, but hopefully you can glean something helpful from it...and feel free to leave questions in the comments section.


New Year’s Resolutions: Making a list and checking it twice?


It’s like an annual curse we visit on ourselves: we make our new year’s resolutions, then follow it up with the promise that Santa’s also “making a list” to check up on us.

Never mind that Santa is just as mythological a figure as the successful new year’s resolution (that is, the odds seem to be against his/its existence, although there are claims to the contrary).

The numbers: 40 to 45% of American adults make one or more resolutions each year. Top resolutions include weight loss, quitting smoking, saving money, and paying off debt. After six months, fewer than half the people making resolutions are sticking to the plan. And yet, the same studies show that people making resolutions are 10 times more likely to attain their goals than people who don’t explicitly make resolutions.

Okay, maybe a slightly-less-than-half rate of adherence isn’t all that bad. But how can you up YOUR odds of being one of the successful ones?


What would I do over?

First, psychologists say to recognize that what you’re doing is making a change. Duh. You knew that, right? But it seems a lot of us act as if change happens to us, not by us. Change is hard. It requires the repetition of the new behavior many times before the change is set—perhaps six months down the road. We get set in the old behavior. It’s comfortable to us, and even if we know it’s not good for us, even if we really, really want to do something different, it’s tough to create that new pattern of behavior.

Second, some suggest that looking deeper than the behavior you’re changing can help. For example, say you want to quit smoking. One way to look at it is all the good things you’re creating in your life by dropping that habit. Another way is to think of it this way: what do I want to be different? One psychologist uses this with clients about to undergo plastic surgery, because it really targets the motivation. Back to smoking. What do I want to be different? Or, as Miller does with her clients, what do I wish were different from my past? Did you start smoking to be cool, as so many high schoolers do? Stress relief? If those are still valid desires, can you replace the smoking with healthier options? (Yoga is very trendy, and accomplishes both at once! And I can guarantee you, you can’t smoke and do a hot yoga practice at the same time, what with the whole breathing thing.)

Navel-gazing not for you? Think about things you’d like to be doing, and why, and how they do or do not fit in with what you’re doing now.

Take some time over the next few days--just a break from the holiday bustle--to think about where you'd really, really like to be this time next year. Tomorrow, we'll jump into some tips for successful goal setting and achieving.