Change Management: Why New Year’s Resolutions Fail

So, it’s mid January. How are you doing with your New Year Resolutions?

Here’s a reality check: Regardless of the change you’re trying to make, if you’ve acquired a track record, it’s highly likely you’ll continue down the same road. Even if this particular change in your behavior were desperately required to save your life – and I mean literally save your life – chances are you wouldn’t make it. Decades of research has made it abundantly clear, the odds are most definitely stacked against you.

Why is it so tough to achieve the goals we set for ourselves? How can we overcome the intractable psychological pressures that hamstring our sincere attempts to make significant changes in our lives?

Fact is, your brain is hardwired to drag you, kicking and screaming, back into the same old habits whenever you try and change. To transform your life requires that you understand this hard wiring so you can avoid the pitfalls along the way. Despite the best of intentions most people never successfully make the changes they crave. You can be one of the few who do achieve their goals.

Here are some of the key issues along the path to real transformation.

Set Goals, But Mind The Gap

When we think about the gap between where we are and where we’d like to be, it makes us feel uncomfortable, doesn’t it? And the larger this gap, the more uneasy we feel. This psychological discomfort is called cognitive dissonance. It occurs whenever we’re stuck between two conflicting thoughts; such as the gap between our current reality and our dreams. And goal setting amplifies our cognitive dissonance because it forces us to focus on this chasm.

We don’t like living with psychological discomfort, and so our brain tries to close the cognitive dissonance gap; generally by giving up. (This outcome is accompanied by a flurry of excuses and procrastination.) Alternatively, we can close the gap by actively moving towards our goal.

The crucial point here is to ensure that the gap between your reality and your goals creates discomfort and yet, at the same time, is believable for you. It’s easy to talk glibly about “shooting for the stars,” but if you jack up your discomfort too far beyond your belief then your chances of success tend towards zero.

Bottom line: Set goals, but mind the gap.

Manage The Fear Messages

Whenever you attempt to make a concrete change to some aspect of your day-to-day behavior, your brain sends “fear messages” that further amplify your discomfort. If you remain unaware of this psychological dynamic, it’s highly likely you’ll back off the success-building activity in order to reduce your discomfort. Here are some of the common “fear messages” to watch out for.

• I can’t do it!
• I’m feeling overwhelmed, I must stop.
• I’m never going to succeed.

The key to overcoming your “fear messages” are to realize that they are simply stories. Whenever your self-talk and conversation contains words and phrases like “I can’t,” “I must give up,” “this will never work,” it’s vital to realize that these are invented narratives, not reality. They are not an indication that you should give up on your goals.

Whenever these stories start to appear, simply subdivide the task in front of you into a series of smaller, very specific steps and take action, immediately, on the first one. Still feeling overwhelmed, subdivide the steps still further.

And if it transpires that you really do lack a specific piece of knowledge or skill, don’t give up; get educated! Take a class, read a book by an acknowledged expert. (Be careful of information you track down on the internet, much of it is highly questionable.) Whatever your personal goal, feed your brain with enough high-quality information to give you the self-confidence to act decisively.

Finally, take action regardless of how you feel. If you can’t disassociate your feelings from your need to take action, you will remain stuck in a rut for the rest of your life.

Don’t Hardwire Your Brain For Failure

Recent research has shown that your brain is an evolving ecosystem that changes, quite literally, from one second to the next. In other words, your thoughts and feeling leave footprints as they change the anatomy of your brain. And so whenever you make a decision to take action, it’s mission-critical that you follow through (and psychologically damaging if you don’t).

Every time you take action towards achieving a goal, you point your brain “footprints” in the right direction. Conversely, every time you wimp out on a task you’ve set yourself, you reinforce the hardwired “failure” pathways. It’s more likely you’ll procrastinate next time and, over time, condition yourself to fall short.

What tactics do you use to achieve your New Year resolutions? We would love to hear them. Feel free to “speak your mind” in the box below…