’Tis the season of lagging resolutions. Are you keeping up with yours? If not, there may be more at work than a lack of willpower. How you set your goals for the year can be as important as your will to reach them. Here’s how.
The road paved with good intentions
The lure of grand goals is powerful. January is full of “new year, new you!” messages. From better financial management to weight loss, good intentions to change abound. But by mid-February, new gym-goers are staying home and second helpings are making a reappearance.
Statistics on general success rates are dismal:
- Only 8% of people are always successful in achieving their resolutions.
- 19% achieve their resolutions every other year.
- 49% have infrequent success.1
The secret is specificity
The process of setting goals proves to be important. A University of Scranton study showed that people who make specific, concrete New Year’s resolutions/goals are 10 times more likely to achieve those goals than those who make non-specific goals or no goals at all.2
General goals lend themselves to failure, the study found, because people focus on the lack of immediate progress or the impossibility of achieving the overall goal. The process of creating concrete goals helps set people’s sights on progress rather than indications of failure.
The most effective goals should be:
- Written. Writing things down creates a sense of purpose that’s missing with verbal goals. It can also provide a reminder of your progress along the way.
- Challenging. If the goal doesn’t stretch you, you’re less motivated to reach for it.
- Believable. Unrealistic or unbelievable goals (“I want to lose 100 pounds in the next 3 months”) undercut your ability to focus on achievement. And that sets you up for failure, which can discourage change in the future.
- Specific. Unspecific goals (“I want to get healthy”) are hard to achieve because both everything and nothing look like progress.
- Measurable. Goals that aren’t measurable (“I want to be a better person”) rob you of the crucial victories along the way. Studies show that people who have a sense of accomplishment toward a goal are most likely to continue striving.
- Deadline-driven. Setting a deadline is about accountability. Deadlines help you put together an action plan and measure progress.
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“Write it down. Written goals have a way of transforming wishes into wants, can’ts into cans, dreams into plans, and plans into realities.”
— Dan Zadra,
Inspirational author and life coach
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Go for 10 in ’10
Whether your goals are physical, mental, spiritual or financial, now’s the time to put them to work for you. Come up with 10 concrete, tangible goals for 2010 — and then create an action plan. To keep them in the front of your mind, use this Wellness Goals Card.
If you’d like more information about how to improve your overall wellness for 2010, visit GuideStone’s new Wellness site: www.GuideStone.org/wellness.
1Steven Shapiro. In cooperation with the Opinion Corporation of Princeton, New Jersey. 2008.
2John C. Norcross, Marci S. Mrykalo, Matthew D. Blagys. “Auld Lang Syne: Success predictors, change processes, and self-reported outcomes of various New Year's resolvers and non-resolvers.” Journal of Clinical Psychology, Volume 58, Issue 4 (2002).