Why most New Year Resolutions don’t work and why!

It’s a fact that less than 10% of people stay committed to their new year resolution for the whole year.

We have all seen it, the gym is packed for the first two weeks of January because people have committed to getting healthy for 2023. Come mid-February, attendance is backdown to normal. Gyms know this and make most their revenue from people making and breaking their new year resolutions.

So I want to take a look at two key factors that influence our resolution.

1. Habits, either creating new ones or changing existing ones.

Habits are auto responses to our everyday life. For example, I get up in the morning and I make a coffee before I do anything else. Or, I meditate every day before I leave the house.?Science tells us that we have to choose just a small action which is easy to do and can be consistent. In the example of the gym, it means doing one more press up or one more squat per session rather than doing 10 extra more. By doing this new action or changing an existing habit every day for 21 days using this formula,?the habit will stick. Another great hack is to habit stack, for example when you clean your teeth every morning and evening, you also spend that two minutes to do squats or every time you make coffee in the morning you practice mindful breathing techniques.

1. The science of self identity

We all have a story about ourselves and our identity, this identification has been formulated over your lifetime and you authored it.?Most of our decisions are made from the?identity we have created for ourselves.?In everyday life we make decisions that meet our identity. So we have to be aware our story, our inner talk. This can be challenging because it can be unconscious. For example, lets say you are a leader of a SaaS scale up which generates ￡6M ARR. Your goal is to grow the company to ￡100M ARR, so there is no point keeping the identify of a leader who has a ￡5M ARR SaaS company, you need to take on the identity of a leader of a ￡100M ARR company now, not when you achieve the goal.?

Ask yourself, what is the difference between a leader of a ￡5M ARR SaaS company versus the leader of a ￡100M ARR SaaS company??How do they feel, what habits do they have, how they show up day in day out? These are the questions you need to ask yourself.

The Self Editing Technique

Remember the identity you have today was created by you. In order for you to create awareness of how your current identity is no longer serving you, you need to act on the two points below.

1. Write down your existing story, in detail and identify all the stories you tell yourself which are stopping you achieving your resolution. Asses how your existing story about yourself is no longer serving you. For example, your self-talk may say something like, “It’s going to almost impossible to achieve our revenue goals this year, due to the market conditions”. Or?“It’s going to be almost impossible to achieve our expansion goals this year with the leadership team we have in place”.
2. Now you are aware of your story you can make the edits. What does your story need to be for your SaaS company to be a ￡100M ARR company??Write down your new story in detail. Once you have this new story, record your new story on your phone and listen to it every day on your way to work or whilst you brush your teeth!

Good luck with your resolutions, whether they are daily, monthly or yearly. The key is consistency, learning to love the process, embrace and it will make the goal sustainable.

This is a great podcast from Steve Bartlett, 5 Scientific Rules for Making & Breaking Habits in 2023!

https://youtu.be/v9VtjcRaRWc

Also worth recommending a book that changed my life, Atomic Habits by James Clear