How To Actually Stick To Your New Year Resolutions
It’s New Year’s Eve. It’s blizzarding here in Southern Ontario. I just got back from the gym where I saw a lot of new faces among the 7 am crowd. The faces were ones of optimism with a hint of insecurity. We’ve all been there.
I’ve been going to the gym consistently for the past 8 years of my life. I’ve seen my fair share of resolutioners (that’s not a word, is it?) set their sights on transforming their physical and mental well-being heading into a new year by purchasing a gym membership.
Good on ‘em.
Inevitably, however, the new faces rarely become regular faces. I don’t need to go into the encyclopedia’s worth of reasons why people don’t stick to their New Year Resolutions. Again, we’ve all been there.
It got me thinking — whilst doing cool down stretches as I watched a family of three purchase their year-long membership from the staff member who was on membership-selling auto pilot — how I could help people stick with their resolution to improve themselves.
A Twitter conversation I had from the night before reappeared in my mind.
Simplicity is key
A Tweet from Jeremy McGrew read:
“I humbly suggest to you that 2020 probably doesn’t require massive sweeping changes. It’s more likely that you’re only a few degrees off in a couple areas, and those minor tweaks would make the huge change in your results you’re looking for.”
It echoed a sentiment I Tweeted about hours earlier.
“Most people could radically change their health in 2020 by picking the furthest parking spot possible at work/mall/grocery. It’d add untold steps to your day & always have you mentally oriented towards health.”
There’s nothing radical or even difficult about choosing a distant spot in a parking lot. The same can be said for choosing stairs over an elevator.
What is radical is how this little resolution reprogrammes your mind. It reorients you towards health.
How so?
Simple. If you intentionally choose to park 300 metres from an entrance with the goal of being more health-conscious, it’s very unlikely that you’re going to go into the mall or grocery store or work and purchase carb-heavy, greasy, and sugary foods and drinks!
That’d be self-sabotage.
Now let’s look at ways to stick to resolutions that are not to do with health.
How about writing or journaling.
Perhaps you want to start a blog on Medium. Maybe you want to start a daily journaling habit. Great!
Instead of committing yourself to writing five blogs a week, write one blog a week and don’t put a minimum word count on yourself. If the blog is 100 words, that’s cool. If it’s 10,000 words, great.
Apply the same non-standards to your daily journal.
It doesn’t have to be a page or two of journaling. Most of my best journal entries (I journal daily) are what I am grateful for written in point form.
December 31, 2019. Today, I am grateful for:
-Going to the gym
-Hockey
-Morning coffee
-My wife’s smile
Imagine writing what you’re grateful for every day for 365 days.
That little action will make your year appear so much better than if you hadn’t done it. And much like parking far away from entrances to buildings, it orients you towards gratitude every day so you’re less likely to look for things to be sour about.
Want to stick to your resolutions? Stack the +1s.
I replied to McGrew’s initial Tweet with my parking lot hypothesis.
My suggestion to someone looking to get in shape was park far away from entrances to buildings. It gets you in a health mindset every day, multiples times a day. Doesn’t have to be overly complicated or drastic.
He replied with:
“Amen — that’s the kind of little thing that gives you a +1 in the win column with almost no effort. Stack the +1s!!”
Stack the +1s. Perfect.
For arguments sake, let’s say you achieved three new habits this year. How would that transform your life come December 31, 2020?
Let’s say your three habits were:
1. Replace pop with carbonated water (i.e. Perrier)
2. Park at the back of every parking lot
3. Write 2–4 gratitudes, daily
Those three habits would lead to you:
- Losing weight
- Improving oral and gut health
- Reducing dependency on sugar
- Drinking more water
- Adding tens of thousands of extra steps to your year
- Getting more fresh air
- Thinking about the good in your day (gratitude)
- Starting a writing habit
I could’ve kept going but you get the point: Stacking those small +1s will lead to radical changes in your life.
What +1s are you going to stack?
Take 20 minutes today and write down two to four +1s for you to stack.
Make them the world’s easiest New Years Resolutions…things you can check off as little wins every single day of your life for the next 365 days.
My promise to you is that if you do this every day for a year, you’ll have lived one of the most transformative, radically improved years of your life. And it’ll all have started from parking at the back of lots and writing down three things you’re grateful for on a daily basis.
No one will believe you improved so much by doing so little. But you will have. And then you can share with the the power of stacking +1s.
