Goal-Setting to Change Your Behaviours
New Year's Resolutions that May Actually Happen
It's an annual ritual, a subject of festive discussion. Last year your resolutions may have been to lose four kilograms and help to feed the hungry. This year? Lose six kilograms and work to save endangered whales.
It may be that the New Year is not the best time to consider behavioural changes. Chances are you are unusually tired or stressed, or reacting to the excesses of the season. In the northern hemisphere, people are likely to be facing a long cold winter and in the south, holiday time and a summer break from routine.
However, if you are determined to set New Year's resolutions, here are some tips for choosing and achieving them.
1. Ground the resolution in carefully considered life goals. Make sure it's about something real for you. Petra Rankin, in her book Fast Track Your Success and Happiness (South Australia: Brief Books, 2005) stresses the need to work towards a synergy between beliefs, perceptions and behaviours. Does the resolution fit with your personal values, or is it merely an unachieved action point that gets shifted from year to year?
A major part of meaningful goal-setting is separating out what you require from what others, or "society", might expect of you. How badly do you really need or want to lose those four kilograms? Arianna Huffington (On Becoming Fearless. New York: Little, Boston and Company, 2007) has adopted as a guiding objective learning how to face life with courage. This has implications for secondary objectives. "True fearlessness", she writes, "comes from a deep and complete acceptance of ourselves--not from what we wear, or how we look...what we do, or accomplish".
2. Accept that achieving your goal will be difficult, and make a plan. Some people have been successful with the negatively-framed cold-turkey approach ("I will never buy another pair of six inch heels"), but not many.
All of the standard advice on goal setting applies here. Rankin advises setting a positive goal with an achievable--but not easy--deadline. Break the task into small steps. Identify resources available to you and any obstacles, and set out a step-by-step approach so that you can see progress.
Resolution: To Give up Smoking
An example of a common New Year's intention is to quit the tobacco habit. You may have decided that, for reasons of health, family and benefits to community, this is a change you are really committed to make.
Significant planning is likely to be involved in following through on such a goal, but a great deal of help is available on the internet and in public libraries. An example of a useful resource is the website of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH).
You will need to consider the best approach for you. Some people use nicotine replacement therapy, non-nicotine products, or alternative therapies such as acupuncture. ASH advises that such techniques have a greater chance of success when used in conjunction with advice and support (sometimes group) programmes. The organisation stresses, however, that "such groups may require a lot of time and commitment from the smoker" and that "no treatment offers a miracle cure".
The quit-smoking example illustrates the importance of having a detailed plan to implement any New Year's resolution that involves behavioural change.
Evolution, Not Revolution
If you are committed to setting a new life course, January 1 may be a beginning, but mostly it will be a day like any other. You could, in fact, start your transformation right now. "Take action immediately", Rankin suggests. "Never leave the site of setting a goal without making a start on the first step".
Perhaps more importantly, applying the "continuous improvement" principle to life is likely to yield real benefits. According to Rankin, the trick is to make changes every day, each innovation building on the last, so that a kind of "compounding" success can result. In this light, a New Year's resolution is less a pledge to quit bad habits, and more a fresh commitment to take charge of the project of your life.
New beginning time
|
Latest Articles