New Goals = New Habits
“Rather than being goal driven. Be habit driven.”
(and watch how the habits ensure the goals fall into place)
I don’t mind New Years resolutions. They give us time to set goals, reflect on our past wins and learnings plus it’s a landmark point in time we can create change from.
I also don’t believe you need to wait for New Years to make resolutions, but seeing as we are here lets go for it but first we need to understand why they don’t work for most.
With in the first week 20% of people break them.
With in the year 80% of people don’t follow through.
This means if you and 4 of your friends are standing here with your resolutions and how you are going to create change next year 4 out of 5 of you will give up. These stats suck, so lets look at why this happens.
Because remember:
Successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals, so the goal cannot be what differentiates the winners from the losers. (Isn’t that mad when you think about it)
Common reasons for not being successful in your resolution.
1. Lack of strategy, systems and planning to hit your goal.
2. Lack of motivation to follow through
3. Lack of accountability from someone to keep you on track when it’s hard
4. Lack of tracking progress to allow you to see if you are on track to achieving your goals
5. Lack of education or skill to competently achieve your goal
6. Poor mindset
Now to break these down each of the possible reasons. Each of these can be a post of their own but to not waffle on, i’ll leave it to the key points.
1. Developing a key strategy.
Modelling Success: Ask yourself, is there someone you know of that has achieved the result that you want to achieve? If yes then this is fantastic. Step 1, ask them some key questions.
a) How did you achieve [insert goal]? (lets focus on weight loss for this).
They might say they started focusing on training, tracked their calories, maybe focused on their steps.
b) What did you stop doing daily / weekly that you previously did?
They might tell you their old habits which were drinking each night, buying pizza every Friday night and binging on the weekends. Maybe pressing snooze on the alarm.
c) How did you stop doing these habits?
Let them elaborate as this is some key information for you to learn how to drop these habits that could be holding you back.
d) What habits did you start doing?
Tracking calories
Getting Steps
Following strength training program
e) How did you learn how to do these and can you show me how?
Some people will spend the time to show you and some might not, but it’s always good to ask for help.
f) What systems do you have in place to make it easier to stick to these new habits? “We don’t rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems” James Clear
– Maybe they started shopping with a shopping list, had certain meals that helped them their calories that were easy, ordered food from a meal prep company, joined a gym class, put their phone in another room in the mornings to force them out of bed when their phone went off, bought a step tracker for work to be able to get their steps in during the day.
g) When if got hard, what did you do to keep you motivated?
h) How did you track your progress to know you were on track?
Lets leave this here for now. If you can interview 2-3 people and collate their answers it will give you even more data to create your systems from. If you are thinking this is too hard then you aren’t ready for change so simply don’t create the resolution, doing this will short cut your way to success because success leaves clues and you are going straight to the horses mouth for answers for this.
If you don’t know anyone, pay a coach for 1-2 hours and ask them these questions and you’ll get a solid plan for creating your systems for success.
2. Having high motivation.
The problem with motivation is when you set a goal it’s high but soon it will become fleeting and your goal will become a distant memory.
Don’t just create a New Year resolution but a Daily Resolution. Something you re commit to every single day and remind yourself why you are doing it. There is an equation for motivation but I will cover this in a bit.
What could your daily resolution be?
“Today I recommit to being the healthiest version of myself, this means I recommit to [insert what you are committing to] the process which could be nutrition, steps, training, what ever the steps are. You also each morning want to look over the day and look at the possible obstacles that could pull you off track and make a plan to overcome them.
Whether it be staying away from Janice’s muffins at work or how to navigate training with the kids.
It’s important to recommit, remind yourself why you are doing it and also the possible obstacles each day and a plan to overcome them.
Create a check list for your daily goals that you check off as you do them and give yourself a pat on the back and say “Just like me” as you do it which reaffirms exactly who you are which is the person who does these tasks.
Adopt a “Win or Learn” mentality instead of an “All of Nothing” mentality. This is key for long term success.
All or nothing mindset is when we fall off our nutrition plan because you had a burger or some food that wasn’t to plan you have an internal dialogue of “screw it” and you go hell for leather to eat all the food because ‘i’ve stuffed up, I may as well keep eating now’ and 2 hours later you lay there with 2 tubs of ben and jerrys and a pizza eaten. You then tell yourself you will start again on Monday and the cycle repeats itself all year long.
A “Win or Learn” Mindset is when we know we are inevitably going to fall short at some point throughout the year but when this happens we don’t shame ourselves. We treat it like an experiment, we stop, we look at the data and assess what happened. Ok, I ate an extra burger just then which is 400 calories over what I was suppose to eat, in the scheme of the year is this ok (the answer is yes), and then go into some reflection and ask “Why did it happen” “What can I do differently next time I’m in this situation so it doesn’t happen again” and then play that out in your mind of what it looks like to choose the better option. This is how we learn.
Key rule: We never miss twice. This means never miss 2 days in a row.
ok now for the brief explanation of the motivation equation.
M = V x E / I x D
or Motivation = Value x Expectancy / Impulsivity x Delay
We want the numerators high and the denominator low to keep high motivation.
Value: 1 to 10 what value do you place on this goal, it needs to be an 8 or higher. Losing weight it could be because you want to be a better role model for your kids, you want to help them implement healthy habits and know you need to be an example for them. So when you reflect on this, it should keep you motivated.
Expectancy: 1 to 10 how likely do you believe you are capable of achieving this, this should also be up there. If it is only a 3-4 / 10 ask yourself “What do I need to do to increase my expectancy to achieve this goal” It could be increasing your nutrition IQ, hiring a coach with a track record, could be getting food from a meal prep service, doing it with a friend.
If we can get expectancy and value high, then we are on track to seeing this through if we keep the denominators low.
Impulsivity: These are the things that will pull us away from achieving our goals. We need low impulses that derail us. Get the chocolate out of the house so it’s hard to fall prey to urges, same goes for booze – if it’s not there or you need to go out and make an effort to get it will work better, put your phone in the other room in the morning so it forces you to get out of bed instead of pressing snooze.
Delay: The key here is to keep a short delay cycle for reward instead of just reflecting 12 weeks later when you said you were going to lose 10 kilos by then. Long delay cycles are a high numerator, short delay cycles are a low numerator in the equation.
Log and journal your wins each and every day for 90 days.
If you set a target to average 10k steps per day
1500-2200 calories every day for 90 days
Train 35-45 times at the Gym in 90 days
Those wins accumulate and BUILD CONFIDENCE
Here you are cultivating the want to do it more
Winning gets addictive 🙂
Repeat this process for every month/quarter and 2023 and it would be UNREASONABLE FOR YOU TO FAIL
(yes you will have the odd reward and break but read that again and let it sink in 🙂 )
Hope that helps
Dan