Are You Celebrating Quitter's Day This Year?
They say that 80% of New Year's Resolutions (N.Y.Rs) fail by the second Friday of January.
What it really comes down to is goal setting - any goal that can be failed in under 14 days, was probably not a very good goal to begin with. It was probably something like "don't eat any sugar at all for the whole year", or "go to the gym every single day", or "be a completely different person than you were literally a few days ago". Destined to fail because they were unreasonable in the first place.
Or you might go the other way, and set a goal that is SO reasonable with a deadline so far away that you never really get started working towards it, because you figure it'll go quick once you get started, so you've still got time to put it off another month. Then suddenly Christmas is looming once again, and now you're not going to get it done by the end of the year. Another year failing
I expect you've probably come across the SMART acronym for goal setting:
Specific - clearly saying what you're going to achieve
Measurable - clearly defining what success looks like
Achievable - something you could actually accomplish
Relevant - a goal that aligns with your life and interests
Timebound - a specific end date to keep yourself on track
You may have even come across SMART-ER goal setting, which also includes:
Evaluate - setting time to review your progress
Readjust - changing elements of the goal and/or system based on your evaluation
Even all those steps aren't going to lead you to success, because it puts too much pressure on sticking to a decision that you made an ever increasingly long time ago. If you've ever picked a meal for a work event MONTHS in advance of the day, you'll know that most of the time nobody remembers what they've ordered, and there's one poor member of staff trying to figure out who's is whose. Making a goal is only the first step, you've got to have a plan on how you're actually going to follow through on it.
This is a good N.Y.R. goal: "I'm going to drop a dress size to fit into my old jeans (Specific, Measurable, Achievable) so that I look and feel good for that wedding I'm going to (Relevant) at the end of February (Timebound) - and I'll track my progress by measuring my waistline every day and taking a weekly average (Evaluate) and will adapt how many calories I consume based on that weekly measurement (Readjust)."
But the reality is that progress is not linear, and if your only marker for success is whatever DEFINITIVE metric you've decided to use, whenever you don't make progress in that one metric, you're going to feel like you've failed. Even if you have multiple metrics - for example, measuring your waist, weighing yourself, tracking which days you stick to your meal plan, how much water you're drinking - the more metrics you have in which you can fail, the more ways you'll feel like you have, when you inevitably can't perform a 100% success rate across the board, in every metric.
So instead of setting a specific goal, what can you do?
Approach it like a scientific experiment where you try to find out not just WHAT does work for you, but WHY some things don't work for you, and what those things reveal. By redefining your goal from something outcome to something process focused, you'll be able to pause, pivot, regroup, and readjust way more easily than if your only focus is on 'achieving'.
The Hypothesis
This is a statement, not a question. This is the claim you’re making, and you’re testing this theory to its limits so that you can be certain that you're correct. This shouldn't just be a statement that you hope is true, or that you'd like to be true, it's a statement that you believe to be true. If you don't believe it's true, the experiment won't work.
For example: I hypothesise that it is possible to drop a dress size by the end of February.
Preliminary Research
Identify the ways in which other people have been successful. There are so many ways to achieve the same goal, and you can't assess them all at once, so during your experiment you'll want to run different tests to see which ones return a positive result. You’ll want to choose methodologies that you are interested in and that you find appealing.
For example: I will look up diet techniques (intermittent fasting, high protein, 3 meals a day with no snacks vs 6 smaller meals a day etc), workout programmes (HIIT, running, yoga etc), or schedules (exercise first thing in the morning vs exercise just before bed) to see what different experts recommend or suggest as things to try.
Define Your Experiments
For each experiment you need to define the independent variable (the habit or action you're attempting to start, stop, or change), and your dependent variable (the way you will measure the success of said habit of action). You'll want to find a way of tracking both your independent and dependent variables so that you can see how they interact. You'll want to track the same dependent variables throughout each experiment so that you can compare the results to each other.
You may want to use multiple measurements to see how different variables affect different outcomes, and these may not just be the overall outcome. Whether your experiment is adding something into your life, removing something, replacing something, or stacking things on top of each other, keep track of how often were you able to do that thing. How difficult was it? How effective was your reminder method? How did it make you feel mentally, physically, and emotionally?
For example: I might weigh myself every day, and measure my waist and hips once a week, but I might also keep track of how many times I felt grumpy that I was doing this new thing, and how many times I failed to perform the experiment (and why). Or, I might try a new diet for 10 days and record not only my tangible change in size, but also how easy it was to stick to this diet, how expensive it was, how it affected my energy levels, and whether or not I actually enjoyed it.
Results
At the end of each experiment you want to compare not just the outcome data, but the process data too. A really effective weight loss method isn't necessarily the best one, if you hated every minute you were doing it. Or finding a sport that you really enjoy may not be enough exercise to keep your metabolism burning hot if you're only able to go out and do it once a week.
For example: I might find that a particular diet and exercise plan resulted in a less rapid change of size, but was easier to stick to consistently and more conducive to long term maintenance. I might discover that cycling between high intensity and low intensity weeks in effort and commitment gives me the rapid results I need, then the time to recover my energy and stabilise the change. Even if both methods were to result in the same OVERALL change, one method may be more suited to my lifestyle than another.
To Conclude...
The reason doing this works so well is that it reframes the purpose of achieving your goals from an objective pass/fail model, to one that focuses on personal growth and discovery. The more you know about what works for you, what doesn't, and WHY, the easier a time you'll have in the future tackling your next big goal, and the next one, and the one after that.
