It’s that time of the year, when our resolution takes a back seat....

Ever noticed your motivation to achieve your New Year's resolutions follow this pattern??

The graph shown above is the Google Trend of the keyword “New Year Resolutions" in the past three months, which to me also resembles the cycle of motivation that drives new year resolutions, every single year. The anticipation of setting big, new goals peaked around the last week of December, which then reached the height of its commitment during the first week of January, to simply dwindle by the end of the month.?

Burdened by the responsibility to fulfil the trillions of intentions set for the whole year, I think of January as the Santa who arrives a little later than Christmas. The whole world is filled with optimism, wonder, prayers, while also handling the pressure of living up to expectations and hoping to come out of the new year as a better person. And then enters February. February chooses to be tardy compared to its predecessor. Resolutions and the intense need to conquer one’s flaws starts pricking us a little. Waking up to the alarm for the gym becomes slightly cumbersome, the new diet plan doesn't seem as enticing and the book that you once started has been intently awaiting your return. It is a cycle that continues every single year and yet, at the end of the year we promise that the next one will be different. We oil this vicious cycle of promises and hopes which for most of us ends in self-scrutiny.

New year’s gives us the jitters. Here’s why.

The beginning of the year is a temporal landmark that all humans share and research shows that we process it as a significant crossing over between our past and future selves. Temporal landmarks are nothing but stark differences or junctions in time that separates itself from our daily mundanity (Shum, 1998, p.423 as cited in Dai et al.2015). This could be any landmark like the beginning of the week, beginning of the month, an important birthday (for example, entering your 30s) and so on. In addition to breaking through our ordinary experiences, these landmarks also give us the opportunity to distinguish and re-evaluate our past, present and future selves.?

Research shows that whenever objects are divided into distinct groups or categories (like the past year and new year), we tend to create a psychological distance between the two distinctions (Bartels & Rips, 2010; Peetz & Wilson, 2013, 2014 as cited in Dai et al.2015). When these distinctions happen within the context of our own self evaluations, we tend to attribute negative characteristics to our past selves and positive characteristics to our present and future selves (Wilson & Ross, 2001, 2003; Ross & Wilson, 2000 as cited in Dai et al.2015). Simply put, we come to the conclusion that the new year also marks the beginning of a “new me”, who would be cleansed of all the past shortcomings. This process of correcting our past selves and its failures play a role in boosting our self-efficacy and the internal belief to achieve personal goals set for our future selves. This self motivation connected with a universal temporal landmark, like the New Year’s, leads to our optimistic new year's resolutions.?

Temporal landmarks such as New Year’s also gain its relevance owing to the sheer volume of information that we consume, from our personal circles, professional role models and our extended social connections, through our social media profiles. The prominent noise that echoes within our personal echo chambers on social media on days leading up to the new years is that of new changes and initiatives that everyone intends to take to better themselves. This hinders our self-evaluations during these landmarks. The idea of the “new me” that we build in our minds now also needs to coincide with the perfectionist version of another definition of “new me” that is projected on these platforms. Similar to influencing us about which brand to add to our next purchase, these social media voices give us cues about which new version of someone else’s personality and growth journey, we should emulate. This adds further pressure at an individual level to set a big goal for oneself which is believed to create a caricatured version of some ideal viewed in the virtual world. This blurs the lines between what we truly want to be in the new year.

Temporal landmarks creates a psychological distance between our past and future selves, which in turn leads to self-motivated plans to alter our past versions, which then mediated by the excess information about idealised role models (a supermarket of resolutions of sorts), freezes our brains to then choose a new resolution that may not completely resonate with our own personal or professional journey.?

A well-intentioned fallacy

Once well-intentioned (and socially mediated) plans for the new year are shortlisted, we put on our analytical hats to think through the various ways in which we can conquer this big goal. Planning, however, is not completely fool-proof by nature. When we plan, be it for our organisational, professional or personal goals, we depend a fair bit on forecasting which is known to fall prey to a fallacy named planning fallacy. This is our tendency to optimistically overestimate the successful completion of tasks in a limited period of time, even when the odds are against us.?

In his book Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, Daniel Kanheman divides the information we use to forecast the completion of a project or plan into two - the inside view and the outside view. The inside view is the insider information that we possess about a project or task, at hand (our ambition, ability, skill etc). The outside view is the statistical information that exists outside of our purview, of other cases or similar projects that have been done in the past. Through his experiments and observations with a group of highly intellectual researchers, he noticed that at the start of any project we tend to overestimate the time and effort taken for the completion of a project, and that we tend to stick to these false estimations even when exposed to external statistical information that proves us wrong.?

He writes,?

‘“Pallid” statistical information is routinely discarded when it is incompatible with one’s personal impressions of a case. In the competition with the inside view, the outside view doesn't stand a chance.’?

Kanheman attributes this oversight in planning to what Donald Rumsfeld called the “unknown unknowns”. At the time of planning it is rarely possible to see the succession of events that we would encounter during the course of completing a task. New Year’s resolutions more often than not are big changes that we wish to make in our lives. While setting these big goals we plan in such a way that we leave no room for situations or events that would not go as planned. It is not humanly impossible for us to forecast everything, however, where we falter is to completely overlook any possibilities of failure altogether. While making big plans, Kanheman suggests that it is imperative to always keep in view that the likelihood of something going wrong is pretty high.?

If you have read bestsellers like The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg and Atomic Habits by James Clear, you would have also read that the best way to build a habit is to take or create cues from your existing lifestyles, that would remind you about the behaviour or task that you want to set as your habit daily. Charles Duhigg also mentions extensively in his book about how fleeting and delicate habits can be, which means that any minute change in the routine of a cue formation can hinder the process of habit building. These minute changes are more often than not, unplanned and unforeseen situations, which we now know are the “unknown unknowns”. This could probably be the reason why some behaviours that ran its course smoothly in the first few weeks of January when you had a more accurate view and control about the contingencies at work, but as time passes by, some unknown unknowns creep up which then disrupts your “cue to behaviour” habit loop.?

And this means starting up all over again, but this time without the self-motivation and external cues linked to a temporal landmark like New Year’s. So we procrastinate! We hope to pick up our slack at the next temporal landmark - our next birthday, maybe?

So is it too late now?

It's never too late to motivate yourself to alter some behaviours and states of mind that don’t serve you. But do keep in mind that you still need to stay sincere to your resolutions even in the absence of all the hoola-boola that you get on social media during the New Year’s. If you still hold your big dreams close to your heart, here are a few things that I suggest you attempt,

Your big changes need to start with smaller chunks

This one is tried and tested many times. Remember that all big changes in life need to be first broken down into smaller and more achievable goals. If you want to start reading more books this year, then start by finding a time to read it. Or start with identifying what activities you need to replace with reading and list them down. Or maybe carry your book around. But also understand that your cues may get interrupted here and there, so don't give up when they do. Acknowledge them and keep going.?

Scan your goals and see the purpose that they fulfil

More often than not, we set big goals to overcome some flaw that we see in our past self (like I mentioned earlier). Take a minute to understand what the flaw is that you saw in your past self. Why do you need to address it? Why do you want to wash yourself off it? Ask yourself questions to understand the real motive behind these goals and why those motives are important to you. In this process, you would probably understand some of your deep rooted belief system that needs to be altered. Acknowledge it, address it and see if the activity or goal that you have chosen actually helps you overcome these beliefs or if it simply covers it up for the time being to make yourself feel better.?

Look through some of the unknown unknowns that happened in the past month

Now that you have some information about your routine and what could go wrong with your plan, think through how you can manage them better. This may involve breaking down your goal, changing your timelines, or even ditching some parts of the goal that may not fit with your routine or mood. It is important to understand that there are many ways to achieve something and accepting what didn't go as planned helps your action plan to change better, in more ways than you think. Be open to brainstorm with yourself and be honest about what didn’t work.

Do you still identify with your resolutions?

Ask yourself if the goals that you set for yourself were internally driven or motivated due to external factors. We are all prone to want a life that we see on social media, but some of it may not truly sit with who we are. Resolutions and big changes add value to your growth only if they truly resonate with who you are. Social media influencer goals need not be your goals. You could take inspiration from it, alter and design it to suit what sits well with you. Our growth journeys are always going to be different, there is no one mantra that fits all (contrary to self-help books).

Finally, have some fun.

Future goals are about having new experiences in life, be it personal or professional. While some of them may require your full attention, find ways to have fun with it. Build goals that give you experiences that are fun, fulfilling and true to who you are.?

For example, one of the goals I set for myself in 2023 was to write more. I started slow by writing only for myself first, then put out a few blogs that I thought people would like to read and now I have found a balance that makes writing fun for me. I keep a list of things that others would benefit from and then some other things that are only to satiate my own curiosity. Like writing this article or sharing my bookish musings on Substack! :)

Remember....

Making a change in life or even our well-settled routine is hard, and that is the case for most of us, irrespective of what popular media would want you to believe. Resolutions are a great way to push yourself to grow and introduce new experiences into your life but it shouldn’t be done at the cost of your well-being. Remember that it is okay to fail the first time you try something. Everybody fails, especially when it comes to resolutions. The magic truly lies in the way that you connect with yourself when you set them for yourself.?

In my personal opinion, it needs to be looked less as filling up a shortcoming and more as an activity to connect with some parts of yourself that you have been ignoring way too long. It is an exercise to look deep within to identify what energy serves you and what doesn’t. We should start looking at resolutions and other temporal landmarks as a way to understand what to let go and what aspects of life to let in. Growth is a very personal journey and it looks very different for you, me and everyone around you. Honour that and respect the kind of growth that your heart and soul craves. There is more that you can find within than you can find outside.

All you need is to pause, slow down and make the effort to look within.?

Hello! I am a Leadership Coach, Mental Health spokesperson, researcher, writer, and an artist. The Quaint Space is my initiative to create space for anyone who wants to explore the quaint spaces hidden in you amidst all the noise. For regular updates about mental health, leadership, research of leadership and well-being and my own research work please subscribe to my LinkedIn newsletter!

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