10 STEPS TO NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS THAT STICK

New Year’s Resolutions are a healthy ritual. As well as reviewing one’s achievements of the year just ended, and deciding on the direction of the new one, New Year’s resolutions are about making or breaking habits. Unfortunately, they are so often not implemented that the expression “New Year’s resolution” has become almost synonym of wishful thinking.

There are ways to make your resolutions stick. Here are 10 steps that will help you install a new habit:

1.????Make one or two resolutions at most. Changing habits takes energy, so it is best to focus on a limited number of changes.

2.????Check that your resolution is meaningful to you and that it brings a clear benefit to you, and maybe also to important people around you. Identify the benefit, it will be a good driver for you to remember when you need it.

3.????Be very specific about the context in which you want to implement the new habit. Want to go running once a week? Decide which day, what time, where, with whom. Because you want to turn the idea into something concrete that you actually activate. If you decide to run on Sundays, you’ll already know about it in the days leading up to it. You can prepare your schedule, call you running partners, have an appropriate breakfast on Sunday morning … If all you had in mind was “I want to run once a week”, you could always say to yourself “Sure, but not today, probably tomorrow”.

4.????Visualize yourself performing the new habit as if in a movie. Then check your sensory experience. Decide on the beginning of the sequence that will serve as a trigger. For instance, my movie for running on Sunday could start with my alarm clock ringing and my delight at seeing my running shoes and clothes that I prepared the day before. My mental movie might also include my energetic breakfast … So doing, I create a sensory sequence that will help me act in accordance with my resolution. I may also decide to adjust the sequence to suit me perfectly.

5.????Identify the resources you need to successfully implement the new habit. For instance, I might need a new diet, or a trainer to start my new practice.

6.????Make a list of familiar behaviors of yours that could derail your resolution. For instance, partying all night before the day you want to run, eating too heavy a breakfast, not finding the time to buy running shoes … For each of these behaviors, identify how they may be contributing to your failure to implement your resolution. Find the hidden benefits of failing to implement your new habit.

7.????Find out what fears lie behind these impediments. Recognize why these fears are important to you and how they contribute to a major belief you have about yourself or your relationship to yourself, others and the world.

8.????Check what you need to be able to commit to your new habit, while feeling secure about these fears. You may want to adjust the content or wording of your resolution.

9.????Make an implementation plan and commit to sticking to it. You can start out easy and only then take on a bigger challenge. For example, you could run for just 20 minutes for the first 3 weeks, then increase to 30 minutes for the next 3 weeks, then 50 minutes ....

10.?Practice your new habit over and over again. A new habit will only become established if you repeat it several times, regularly, over a significant period of time. The more you practice it, the easier and smoother it becomes.

@Antoine Bebe

Protocol inspired by John Grinder’s New Behavior Generator, Robert Kegan’s and Lisa Lahey’s Immunity to Change, NLP techniques and some recent developments in neurosciences