Life Skills - Habitualising your New Year Resolutions
By the time you read this post you may have already failed in your New Year Resolution. If so, you will not be alone. Research by ABC News in the US suggested that 80% of us will fail in this regard, other research suggests that number is even higher.
Which all begs the question, why do so many of us make well intentioned resolutions and fail to keep them? We do after all start with presumably good intentions and desires, having identified something in our personal lives which we want to change.
There are numbers of reasons why we might fail ranging from unrealistic dreams which over face and defeat us at the first step, to not being able to adjust our environment to make the resolution work. The break which is New Year may feel like the perfect time to stop, re-align and change direction. The reality for most of us is, it’s just a couple of days off from our routine, which otherwise may dominate what we do and soon re-asserts itself.
Research in the US on Gym membership shows a significant increase at the start of the year as many of us start with the intention of exercising more, losing weight or improving our health. Gym attendance remains above the annual average until mid-March but shows real signs of decline from as early as the third Thursday in January. By mid-February there has been an increase in weekly visits to fast food restaurants equal to a drop in weekly visits to the gym.
The Rise and Fall of New Year’s Fitness Resolutions in 5 Charts – Bloomberg
So, what can we do to increase our likelihood of success?
The answer starts with developing good habits. Whatever we want to do, or change, we need to habitualise our intended activities and equally, break the habit of anything we want to stop.
“Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.”
Malcolm Gladwell
But, habits are not choosy; they will happily form around both good and poor repeated actions. They are triggered by a lesser event or circumstance which may be quite unremarkable and, so difficult to identify.
Going to bed, for example, triggers a series of actions from locking doors, putting off lights to cleaning teeth and moisturising. Each individual action triggers the next and so on.
Our lives are often made up of many such sequences, how we prepare to teach a class, commute to and from work, or resolve an issue with a colleague. If, therefore, we want to make any changes we need to be prepared to examine what we are doing and when, to understand how these actions contribute for or against what we want.
Certain things may be outside your control such as a timetable which commits you to specific places at certain times. The ergonomics of your workplace may be fixed, if you work on a production line for example, but may have latitude otherwise.
Habits form when we start to make our changes in small bite size chunks. Perhaps putting wine in a cupboard rather than having a bottle on display will remove the visual trigger to immediately have a glass when you relax in the evening.
The possibilities, as described more eloquently by Al Pacino, are all over the place when we look. If we want our New Year Resolutions to stick, we need to start making some of those small changes, build in the triggers for our preferred habits, remove the unwanted triggers. As our new habits settle then the bigger changes we want will start to come into sight crucially, in a way that we can sustain.
What does this have to do with Street Safe Thinking?
Everything really. At the crux of staying safe wherever we are is street safe awareness. This year, get into the habit of looking around you. As you leave a building look left and right, when you enter a room look all around it, get into the habit of taking in what is going on around you. Build the habit and life skill of awareness so that you can better understand how you want to move forward.
To learn more about triggering habits ...
If you want to learn more about making changes and creating habits which last, why not have a look at Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg.
Banner photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
