New Year Resolutions -Why Some Achive Theirs, Others Give Up!

When we make our New Year resolutions, most of us are driven by what we think we should do (lose weight, give up smoking, find a better job, etc). Some of us have strong will power (a left brain activity), and will drag ourselves out of our bed at 6 AM to visit the gym or throw away all the cigarette packets or go on a diet. And most of us will follow these new regimes and changed lifestyle for a few weeks or months and then suddenly find dozens of reasons why we can’t continue: need to spend more time with family, my boss being horrible in office, girlfriend not liking 6 AM wake up call, the lousy English weather, Gordon Brown’s economic policy, global recession, and so on.

And then back to life as usual. Until next time.

How many times do you think that people try to achieve their new goals before they give up? The average is less than one time. Most people give up even before making the first attempt.

In his book What They Don’t Teach You In The Harvard Business School, the author describes a research conducted between 1979 and 1989 on students graduating out of the school. In 1979, the graduates of the MBA programme were asked if they had set clear, written goals for future and made plans to accomplish them. Only 3% of the graduates reported having written goals and plans, and another 13% had stated that they had goals, but not in written form. The rest 84% had no specific goals at all.

A decade later, in 1989, the same members of the class who had by then settled in their career were interviewed again. The researchers found that the 13% who had goals, albeit unwritten, were earning on average twice as much as the 84% of students who had no clear goals in 1979. But the most surprising findings was that the 3% of graduates who had clear, written goals and plans when they left Harvard were earning, on average, ten times as much as the other 97% of graduates who had no written goals.

What makes written goals so powerful? Commitment and Action

The answer lies in the fact that the process of putting goals down on paper forces you to ask questions which help clarify in your own mind as to what the goals is, how important it is for you, and what obstacles you might face. In fact writing down goals also helps in breaking down big long-term goals into small chunks which provide clarity of steps when it comes to taking action.

But more importantly, I have found that the process also has an important effect on how our mind grapples with future plans we make for ourselves. The planning process itself is a left-brain (our rational brain, conscious mind) thinking, but the process of putting the plans down on paper makes an impact on our sustained commitment to act which requires our sub-conscious (right brain) to be fully engaged. Only when the sub-conscious is fully awake to the rational plans (need to lose weight, make a career change, etc) we make for ourselves, can we get the drive and momentum to keep going.

In the seventies and eighties, a huge amount of research was carried out by several psychologists on how the most successful people set their goals and went on to achieve these. They identified four key factors that made goals powerful and must:
• Prove-able – Goals must be specific and measurable: want to be ‘rich’, ‘successful’ etc are not measurable; some people will consider themselves rich with a thousand dollars in their pockets, for some a few credit cards in their wallet is enough to give them a feeling of being rich.
• Positive – goals must be stated in positive terms. Our brain does not understand negative commands: instead of saying ‘I want to lose weight’, write down ‘I (want to) weigh xxx stones’.
• Present tense – goals must be stated in present tense, as though you had already achieved these goals. For example, you would write, “I weigh xxx stones.” Or, “I run my own business with a turnover of xxxx.”
• Personal – must be personal to you; i.e., it is in your control. Instead of saying ‘I would like my company to give me a raise’, state as ‘I have exceeded my sales target by 25% and therefore I want to ask for a raise’.

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