Part of the series “Access your most powerful version”
How to succeed in your New Year’s resolutions
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This week, I had the pleasure of accompanying my friend Nancy Berk to record her podcast Entertaining statistics about why New Year’s resolutions fail so often and how to change that in your own life. It made me think again why so many of these resolutions end, as most do before the end of February. Studies have shown that approximately 80% of New Year’s resolutions fail and that many people over the years (including myself) have written about new approaches needed to achieve our major goals and resolutions, including naming them. differently, approach them differently and see them differently.
Personally, I don’t dedicate myself to making New Year’s “resolutions” on their own because there’s so much publicity and pressure around that it seems to me that they rarely work. I decide to address it more as a year-end review of what has gone very well and what hasn’t, and what has exceeded my expectations, both in my business and in my personal life. Below I make some key decisions about what I want to expand in terms of my focus, energy, time, and financial investment for the coming year. I think more about how to answer this critical question: What are the key issues I want to expand and highlight next year and for what desired results? Then I create a concrete plan with steps and milestones to achieve what I believe will generate the most happiness and reward. And I have outside help when I need it to continually evaluate these plans and steps. This is the approach that works best for me.
That said, over the past 15 years in my professional therapy and training work, I’ve seen that most of us simply can’t make significant changes in our lives if one key thing is missing: understanding them on a deep level. why do you operate the way you do, and recognizing what keeps you locked into specific “negative,” self-sabotaging, or self-limiting behaviors that resist change. Once you understand more intimately your mindsets, values, beliefs, habits, and great fears, you will begin to realize why certain goals will be very difficult for you to achieve and even harder to maintain, unless you commit to a deeper level of change.
What happens at a deeper level that fails New Year’s resolutions and what are the three main reasons why they die in the vineyard?
Here’s what I saw:
# 1: Your consciousness must change before your behavior can change
Einstein once said, “We can’t solve a consciousness-level problem that created it.” This is so true. As an example, suppose you are in a job you hate and your boss regularly abuses you. And it’s not the first time you’ve had a horrible job. You say at the end of the year, “That’s all. I’ve had it! Next year I’ll find a new role with a big head, doing chores I love.”
While this is a fabulous goal, chances are it won’t happen if you don’t change the looks of it yourself first, so that you can attract — and maintain — positive treatment to your life and work. Often, people who are chronically abused at work have been abused throughout their lives. It’s usually a very old problem for them. This chronic condition can arise from childhood, where our boundaries were violated in a basic way and we were never able to speak and defend ourselves because it was not safe to do so.
In these cases, especially when there was narcissism in one or both parents, people grow and develop in a way that makes their tolerance for abuse greater than those who were raised in a healthy and nutritious way. . My therapist friend and fellow therapist, Janneta Bohlander, has shared that in these cases, “your selector is broken.” These individuals often continue to “choose” or advance (unconsciously, of course) the wrong people, work cultures, bosses, and jobs that harm and replicate the same kind of dysfunction in which they grew up. Unfortunately, until we are able to heal what has hurt us in the past, we will continue to perpetuate the challenges we most want to escape.
# 2: You don’t have an accountability structure to help you keep changing
Not only are there big changes and important goals. They require sustained action (and a different type of action than you are used to) that can move you toward the goal despite challenges, struggles, and setbacks. This sustained action is difficult to achieve on our own because it takes us away from our comfort zone and our usual ways of dealing with life. While some people can take responsibility on their own, I’ve seen that the bigger the goal, the more you need help with external accountability, especially over time as the juice and the initial emotions of the goal fade and the going becomes harder. .
If your goal is to be happier, healthier, richer, stronger, more successful, or more accomplished, to achieve those goals you need to become someone different from who you are today. To do this, external support is very useful. The right kind of helper (as opposed to the wrong kind) encourages you to see what you can’t about yourself and connect with the highest version of who you are and who you can be, and also where you sabotage your own growth.
The right accountability partner believes in you and your big goal before it is “traced” and serves as an honest and true mirror that reflects your way of approaching things. The right accountability partner will help you expand your toolbox and capabilities so that you can respond to challenges differently and in a more intentional and trained way.
We don’t usually make big changes alone or in a vacuum. Most of us need great outside help and an ongoing accountability structure to keep moving towards our higher growth just when we want to make a bond.
# 3: You’re actually scared and it’s totally resilient to achieving that big goal and you won’t give up
You may consciously want to achieve a specific goal, but if you are afraid to die internally to achieve that goal, you will not let yourself be done.
Years ago, I read Gay Hendricks’ great book, The big leap, and I learned a lot about our “upper limit problem” and the four barriers to getting what we consciously think we want. Since then I have interviewed Hendricks several times (both on this blog and on mine Find brave podcast) and I continue to learn more about these four hidden barriers, which are:
Hidden barrier no. 1: Feeling fundamentally flawed
The biggest and most shared fear is that many of us feel that there is something fundamentally wrong with us and that we do not deserve great success and happiness. This fear causes us to refrain from reaching our full potential because we believe we do not inherently deserve it.
Hidden barrier no. 2: disloyalty and abandonment
Another very broad fear is to be loyal or to leave behind people who have been there for us in the past. We retire from greater success because we fear ending up on our own, abandoning our roots and leaving behind people we love or care for.
Hidden Barrier # 3: A belief that more success carries a greater burden
A third fear is to be a burden; some people subconsciously believe that more success will carry a greater burden for us and for others.
Hidden barrier no. 4: the fear of the extraordinary
Common among gifted and talented people, this fear often stems from a strong subliminal message they received when they were children of their families: that if you shine too much, you will make others feel bad or look bad.
I have experienced each and every one of these hidden barriers and I know first hand how difficult it can be to review these beliefs and overcome these deep fears.
As Hendricks shares, most of us have internal upper limits on the degree of success, love, wealth, kindness, health, and so on. that we will allow in our lives. I think this is one of the main reasons, for example, that those who win the lottery are more likely to go bankrupt within three to five years than the average American and that 70% of the winners of the lottery lottery ends up breaking. There are all sorts of behavioral and external reasons for this phenomenon, certainly, but in my work as a therapist and coach, I have observed that internal reasons are more powerful. In this case, maintaining and maintaining immense wealth can be very difficult for those who have not built the strength, boundaries, actions, and belief systems that allow them to maintain a high level of wealth.
In the end, it is an internal work that is needed to maintain your definition of great happiness and success. We can take all the well-advised steps in the world, but without cultivating the positive beliefs and behaviors and abilities that build a solid foundation for success, it will still be very difficult to achieve your most exciting goals.
Want to make an exciting New Year’s resolution that you can really achieve during the new year?
The best step to achieving a great goal is to understand very deeply why you want that goal and what motivates you to achieve sustained progress, and then proactively address your biggest fears about achieving that goal. Find out now what there is to believe: 1) that you really deserve it, 2) that you really deserve it, and 3) you can manage other people’s reactions when you finally get what you want.
To achieve your highest and most rewarding goals, work with Kathy Caprino on her Professional advancement programs and take it Amazing Career Project professional growth training program.