“Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbours, and let each new year find you a better [person]”
Benjamin Franklin
This New Year I encourage you to take a look back at your previous New Years and recall all the past resolutions that have fallen by the wayside.
As a professional coach, it’s rare that I would ask a client to focus on their failures, but I want you to think about what those broken resolutions have cost you? Go ahead, write it down. I also encourage you to think about what successfully achieving your most coveted resolution would be worth to you? Again, take a moment and write that down.
Now the all important question……If there was a way to help you to achieve your goal, and in the process reduce or eliminate the costs associated with failure, on a scale of 1-10, how willing would you be to explore that?
It is no secret that the odds against keeping a New Year’s resolution are steep. In 2007 psychologist and author Professor Richard Wiseman conducted a study of 3000 people attempting to achieve a range of New Year’s resolutions, including losing weight, visiting the gym, quitting smoking, and drinking less. One year later, only 12% actually achieved their goal.
What’s clear from the research is that the simple act of setting the intention to make a change in the New Year sharply improves your chances of accomplishing a positive change. For those of you who have been reading these blogs for a while, you already knew that, as we’ve talked about the importance of being clear on your goals and knowing what success means to you in order to achieve it in any area of your life.
According to a 2010 article in The Wall Street Journal behavioural experts say that the low success rate for keeping New Year’s resolutions is simply because we approach the process the wrong way: by relying on willpower. What works far better, researchers say, is training other parts of the brain responsible for linking positive emotions to new habits and conditioning yourself to new behaviours.
Again, for the regular readers amongst you, all of this might well be sounding very familiar; back in my previous blog, It’s High Time We Answer The Question we defined coaching as a powerful process that supports people to achieve [their objectives], by helping clients reshape their ways of thinking, feeling and acting in order to become who they really want to be.
So, what is it then (according to the research), that separates the successful resolution-keepers from the rest of the field?:
- They set a clear intention and were clear on their goal;
- They made specific, concrete action plans to change their daily behaviour;
- They broke big tasks into A.I.M. S.M.A.R.T steps;
- They made a habit of rewarding themselves for small successes;
- They tapped other people for support and to hold them accountable; and
- In the face of lapses and setbacks, they expected them and didn’t allow discouragement to creep in.
Essentially the research and the “experts” overwhelmingly support the application of the typical external-focussed coaching process for achieving your New Year’s resolutions – and rightly so according to the latest ICF research on satisfaction rates amongst coaching clients.
However, according to Stanford University professor, Baba Shiv, who’s an expert in neuroeconomics, when setting a resolution, simply deciding to change your behaviour may work for a while. But when the cognitive parts of the brain responsible for decision-making become stressed by other life events, that resolve is likely to succumb to an emotional desire for instant gratification.
If I didn’t know better I would swear that these people have been listening in to my conversations with prospective iPEC students!!
If that’s the Truth then we can only really know how effective the reconditioning process has been when a stressful life event occurs to test us. And here’s the kicker, our lives today are chock FULL of stressful life occurences!! We’ve all been there, we’ve all tried diets or exercise plans that have unravelled, we’ve all made action plans that have never materialised and we all know that if change was really that easy then all of us would be doing it effortlessly.
So as the New Year rolls around, I encourage you to take a look back at our previous posts on the inner obstacles to change. As we’ve talked about before, at iPEC these are called the 4 Energy Blocks. They are:
As you’ll recall, energy blocks are like invisible brick walls; it’s only by shining the light of awareness on them that we can begin to notice them, break through them and take action to realise our dreams on the other side.
Earlier I asked if there was a way to help you to achieve your goal, and in the process reduce or eliminate the costs associated with failure, on a scale of 1-10, how willing would you be to explore that?
If you answered 6 or above, this New Year………
- Pick one resolution your committed to achieving;
- Go back to the exercise at the beginning of this article where you wrote down what your broken resolutions have cost you and what successfully achieving your goal would be worth to you;
- Consider what it would take to move you up the scale of willingness, for example, from a 6 to 7, or a 7 to an 8.
- Explore hiring a coach to help you to successfully achieve your dream, be who you want to be and live to your fullest potential.
Best Of Luck And Happy New Year To You All!!
