How to Make New Year Resolutions Stick Right till the End of the Year?

Everywhere you look, you have overwhelming deluge of ideas and inspiration to make this New Year your best year ever. And, within a week or maybe a month, most new year resolutions and commitments end up under the carpet. Here's why and how to make them work for you:

1. Recent research shows that when our identity-based intentions (those which make us feel good about ourselves) are noticed by others, we are less likely to translate them into action. For example, if you declare to your friends that you will spend more time with your kids this year, you are less likely to follow through because the declaration itself made you feel like a good parent and gave you a false sense of identity completeness. A good idea would be to keep your intentions to yourself so that you don't get a sense of completion simply by declaring your intention to an audience. Share, of course, with your Mastermind Group who holds you to account to your intentions and creates a space for you to be bigger than who you are. 

2. You are more likely to follow through if you think about and express your intentions to others in ways that emphasize how what you’re going to do is valuable and desirable to you in its own right, not just as a way to bolster your identity and make you feel good. For example, it would be better to express your intention to spend more time with your kids by declaring - I will spend more time with the kids this year because I love being with them and they really need me at this moment. 

3. Telling others does actually make you more likely to do it, only as long as you really want to do it. Your declaration - I will read more and watch less TV this year - will work only if you really want to read more. Ultimately, what you end up doing is almost always what you really want. Therefore, if you ended up not following through on a particularly resolution / intention, it is usually because you weren't really committed to doing it right at the start. It was more like a desire, than a powerful intention. Dispassionately assess each new year resolution to know if it is a mere wish or you really have a deep burning desire for living it. 

4. Having outcome goals is not enough, you must have process goals which give you a roadmap to create the outcomes. If your outcome goal is to be 75 Kgs and currently you are 100 Kgs, then your process goals could be - Diet Management (cut out white food products, weekly fruit diet, one raw vegetable meal a day etc.), Daily 30-minute run, Weekly Golf game etc. Not having process goals give you no access to what actions to take on a daily basis to create the outcome. It is only in taking daily tiny action do the big resolutions get fulfilled.

5. Another major reason why resolutions don't stick around till the end of the year is that human memory is unreliable. It is really a case of out of sight, out of mind. If you don't have a structure to review your new year resolutions daily, you will miss out on taking actions to create the outcomes for the year. If your intention for the year is to be fit and be a certain weight, having that intention written out where you will read it everyday will remind you to take action. What I get my clients to do before the beginning of every year is to have a ONE-PAGER PLAN to carry around with them:
a. Personal Inner Commitment of who you are committed to be.
b. Your Big Dream for the year.
c. Your Top 5 Values, which is your promise of how you would respond to everything that shows up in your world.
d. Your Top 5 Outcome Goals spanning all the 5 areas of your wheel of life - deeply fulfilling successful career, loving harmonious relationships, happy responsible kids with their genius joyfully expressed, nourishing nurturing me-time and making a difference
e. Your Top 10 Process Goals to realize your outcome goals above

6. Ofcourse, make your new year resolutions SMART
a. Specific and not generic. You should know what specifically you would hear, see and feel if you fulfilled your intention. Also, writing your intentions in the present tense helps you to visualize the outcome, making action taking a lot easier than otherwise. Not just 'I want to be fit'. 'I am fit, feel energetic and positive right through the day, hear people tell me how good I look and I love who I see in the mirror.' is definitely more action inspiring.
b. Measurable so that you know whether you achieved it or not. 'I want to be fit' isn't an effective resolution. I want to be fit with my perfect weight of 75 Kgs has a much better chance of getting you to do something about it because you can track your progress along the year.
c. Who defines Achievable? Only you. Take an outcome goal that you BELIEVE (mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually) you can achieve. The belief is what determines whether it is achievable or not. A word of caution here - sometimes we want to so desperately create something but deeply hidden in the layers of our mind is the belief of not really being good enough to create it. Since our evolution has been survival / fear based, all humans have 3 basic fears - I am not good enough; I am all alone; I am not important enough. It is important to work with your coach through these fears to increase your performance, productivity and effectiveness.
d. Again, who defines what is Realistic? Only you. It is about you believing with your heart, mind, body and soul that your outcomes can be realistically created.
e. Ofcourse, New Year resolutions are timebound by having the end of the year as the day of the reckoning.

7. TAKING ACTION DAILY. Nothing from 1 to 6 above will shift anything if this is missing. To take daily action; you need energy, belief and commitment. Learning to increase each of these requires you to have mental, physical, emotional and spiritual Growth Habits; allowing you to remove the curtain between you and You, between you and your inner Light to be bigger than who you are right now, to make the Big Dent in the Universe that you were born for.

Claim 2019 as your year and create the Life you are meant for.

Love, Jyoti.