I just Googled ‘New Years Resolutions’ – guess how many results turned up?

Over 5.5 million.

I’m not particularly surprised. As a coach I’ve spouted my fair share of platitudes about New Years Resolutions and how important they are. I know that coaches and lifestyle guru’s right around the world are espousing the need to make ‘realistic’ resolutions and offering all kinds of ways to stay on track with them.

Not me. Not any more. To be honest, I’ve never liked New Years Resolutions. Let’s face it, it’s pretty pointless waiting all year to decide on one or two things that you kinda sorta want to stop doing, but that you know full well you’re not really committed to following through with anyway. How silly is that?

Resolutions don’t work for 3 reasons.

1. There’s no difference between a resolution and a goal. Goals do have a role to play, but I only use them in very specific situations these days. That’s normally with small, bite-sized chunks of things that can be easily measured, like losing 5lbs or having a writing project finished by the end of the month (check out Joe’s Goals for a neat little online app) – not the bigger, more nebulous stuff.
   
   Goals come with problems, and I’ve seen it time and time again. The problem is that as soon as you set yourself a goal you’re saying to yourself that you want more in your life than you have right now. Because you’re now aware of where you want to go and the fact that you’re not there yet, there’s a temptation to conclude that you’re less than, not as much as, not as good as. The temptation is to deduce that because where you are now is not where you want to be you’ve somehow failed already.
   
   There are other problems with goals too – a significant one being that along the road of working towards a goal you learn all kinds of new things, and those things are frequently worth more than the goal itself.

   Most people tend to think they need to set themselves goals and objectives to see things happen, but that’s missing the point. Goals and objectives are okay, but as we all know real growth and real pleasure is in the experience, NOT in the end result.

   This is why I’ve moved away from an approach centered around goals and encourage people to play games instead. The whole point about games is that the joy of the game is in the playing. You get to decide what game you want to play and what winning looks like, and when you start playing you get involved and engaged in a way that doesn’t happen with goals. Games are fun in a way that goals just aren’t.

2. The commitment and longer term motivation just isn’t there. That’s why over a third of resolutions don’t make it past January and over three quarters are abandoned soon after. Sure, you might get an initial burst of motivatoin but that never lasts. Motivation is like the big rocket boosters on the space shuttle – it gives you initial spurt of energy to get up and get moving, but it’s just not sustainable.
   
   What you need is something more fundamental, more central and more important to you. Don’t take something outside of you and try to make it relevant and important – what you want has to come from the inside, and that then becomes like the space shuttles maneovring thrusters once you’re up there in orbit – giving you the ability to make those small adjustments that make a big difference.
3. The timing’s all wrong. Not only are you coming off the back of the holidays and hitting the January slump, but you see the whole of the year stretching ahead of you and summer’s 6 months away.
   
   More importantly, what kind of person waits all year to make a choice about something? Real confidence isn’t about making some woolly, half-hearted decisions that don’t really mean anything. That’s not what truly confident people do. Truly confident living is knowing that you can make choices at any time of the year and keeping a positive intention behind those choices.

I’m not a fan of resolutions, what I want to see is people making real and relevant decisions that they can really engage with all year long.