The arrival of a new year brings the chance to reinvent ourselves… this year, you’re going to be fitter, healthier, happier, stronger, calmer, more present… the list goes on. Yes, you’ve made these in the past and yes, you’ve broken every single one after just a few days. But this year is different.
January is a great time to start afresh with a clean slate and get the year off to a good start for you and your family. Perhaps, like millions of others, you’ve taken stock over the past few weeks and decided to make some resolutions.
The reality is, resolutions are hard to keep. According to a survey by Discover Healthy Habits, despite a success rate of 75% after a week, only 9-12% of people are still successfully keeping their resolutions by the end of the year. The question is: why?
Despite our very best intentions, we have a tendency to bite off more than we can chew when it comes to resolution-setting. We decide to try and do everything at once: start a new family fitness regime; ditch the booze; stop the kids eating sugary treats; get homework done as soon as school is over, and so on. We adopt an ‘all or nothing’ approach because we think this is the only route to success. The trouble is, setting multiple goals can feel utterly overwhelming and leave us not knowing where to start.
On top of setting too many resolutions, another obstacle can be that we aren’t clear about the how. For example, your resolution might be, ‘I am going to get the whole family fit’, but you aren’t sure about what that actually means. Or you might decide, ‘This year, we are going to stop drinking fizzy drinks’, but you haven’t thought through the steps you are going to take to achieve this.
As James Clear says in his ground-breaking book, Atomic Habits,
‘You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.’
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