Happy New Year! A new year means new beginnings, new hope, new energy, a clean slate, a fresh chance to accomplish goals and dreams. It’s a heady time. Mostly, however, it’s an illusion.
Most New Year’s resolutions fail. More than a third don’t even last a month. Why?
Life gets in the way. If accomplishing your goals were easy, you would have already achieved them. Something is in your way.
That something will be different for every person, but if you have goals undone or bad habits unbroken, your obstacle is somewhere in your life.
Willpower alone is almost never the problem, and so more willpower is rarely the solution. The problem is that for you to change, your life has to change, and most of us like our habits and routines, which is why we fell into them in the first place. Self-improvement can be a heavy lift.
What’s the solution? Start with smaller goals. How small? Tiny. Really tiny.
Like “I will floss my teeth.” Or, “I will drink a glass of water with breakfast.” Or, “I will walk for five minutes.”
To start making changes, it helps to pick something small, but tangible, so you’re sure you can do it.
Why small goals? Because every time you accomplish a goal—any goal, no matter how small—you prove to yourself that change is possible. You get a taste of success, and that taste will make you hungry for more. With more success comes more confidence and a greater ability to make more changes that don’t vanish after a month.
The old saying about the longest journeys isn’t that they begin with coasting into your destination. Journeys start with a single step. For most of us, the best first steps are small, concrete, and achievable within the confines of our lives as they are right now.
If your goal is easy enough, it’s not too hard to get started, and more importantly, it’s not too hard to keep going. And then, over time, as successes pile up, you can add more and more challenges and changes until you’re living the life you want to be living.
At least, that’s what I’m going to be trying this year. Small steps and incremental changes that I hope will yield big results when they have had time to germinate and grow.
So, if you’re going to give resolutions a go this year, think small. Small goals are often bigger than you think.