New Year’s Resolutions, Part 2: How To Make ‘Em Stick

In Part I, I explored why most well-intentioned people fail miserably when it comes to seeing their New Years resolutions through to the end.  In search of understanding, I sought the advice of our very own team of Precision Nutrition experts.

Everyone pretty much agreed: New Year’s resolutions get a lot more attention than they deserve.  Limiting goal setting to this time of year and relying on the declaration of your goals is really just a recipe for pending failure.

If you review our experts’ strategies for success, you’ll see they share the following things:

• Many of them work towards finding meaning and purpose. They stay motivated and inspired by following their joy and passion.
• They begin immediately, right now. They don’t wait until tomorrow, Monday, January 1st, or whenever life is magically “perfect”. They seize the opportunity to start today.
• They embrace imperfection and flexibility, and plan accordingly. They don’t assume that they’ll ever be perfectly ready and life will be running smoothly. Instead, they incorporate their resolutions into their “imperfect” lives that are full of other demands and chance events.
• To help them do that, they break their goals into smaller, manageable tasks. “Spend 10 minutes a day chopping vegetables” is a lot less scary and a lot more realistic than “eat healthier”, isn’t it? Just as with PN body composition measures, they use outcome-based decision making. They review what worked and didn’t work, and the results their decisions produced. They judge these results and tweak the processes and inputs accordingly.
• To make this outcome-based decision making easier, they check in regularly, more often than once a year – monthly, weekly, or even daily.
• They don’t always need to find a new resolution. If they’re already on a good course, they commit to staying on it. If they’re already doing good things, they commit to doing good things better.

This list shows the reasons why these folks are the experts.  Whether in the field of nutrition and training, or any other area of interest, those that rise to the top are most successful because of the actions they take to get there. The good news is that anyone can make resolutions work for them – we are all experts on something.

Think of something in which you’ve had success in the past.  Maybe it was a job, a hobby, a sport, changing a habit, school – anything.  What were some of the qualities and attributes you exhibited to obtain that success? Whether it was perseverance, determination, commitment, planning, adaptability, grit, purpose, focus or desire, the actions you took to achieve your goal most likely incorporated the following steps.

Step 1: Think your goals through

Whether done consciously or not, the path to success starts with aligning your commitment and your values.  Ask specific questions to help yourself understand why this goal has meaning for you and to define the steps you must take to get there.  The 5 Ws approach is very useful:

What do I want; what will it take to get there?
When is the right time to start; when will I know I am there?
Who will I become; who will support me?
Where does this goal fit in?
Why do I want to achieve this goal?

Continue asking the last question in particular until you get at the underlying motivation for your goal. For many, the idea of looking good is not enough of a reason to stay on track, but when they can associate looking good with feeling of being sexy and loved by their spouse, there is a stronger emotional commitment to achieving it.

Another way to characterize the outcome of your goals is to envision that the Future You could communicate with the Now You all the things you have accomplished. This allows you to define a period of time over which you expect to make progress, and conceptualize what that might look like.

If I use my general goal of pursuing continual improvements in my physical health and physique each year (as I described in Part 1), I might define my expectation more concretely by writing a letter from the next January me to the now me.

Dear January 2009 me,

It’s been a great year and you have really made some great progress towards improving your strength, physique, and overall function.

Remember how you were kind of stuck with your body composition and your low back often ached after training?  Well by being diligent with the yoga, exploring new ways to train your lower body, and carefully observing hunger cues and energy, you are now looking leaner all over and have been pain-free for the past few months.

And you are now doing multiple sets of 4-5 full range pullups and your track sprints are faster than ever!  You are now ready to think more seriously about what competitive athletic opportunities you might have in 2010.

Stay in touch,
December 2009 me

Write a letter and save it. Refer to it when your motivation needs refreshment. Hopefully you’ll get to meet that incarnation of Future You. (And maybe even sooner than you think!)

Step 2: Create a plan

With a vision and a commitment to realize your goal, frame your resolution in terms of the behaviours that need to be changed instead of a changed outcome. Using an inverted pyramid as the model for your plan, start with the broad idea of what your goal is about, and work your way down from more abstract to more practical, until you distill the process to a single point of actually doing it. Ask yourself: What needs to be in place, or to happen, to make this general desire become real?

I’ll use myself as an example.

1. General vision: my plan starts with wanting to reduce my impact on the environment and improve my health through quality foods.
2. In order to operationalize this, I will need to expand the number of vegetarian meals I eat, and limit my meat, dairy and fish consumption to that produced locally using intensive farming practices.
3. To ensure this happens, I can learn and plan. I can benefit from considering both the active and passive components of my plan: I will take time each week to review the expertise of vegan athletes and Precision Nutrition resources to learn about vegetarian menu planning and nutrition, and arrange a regular monthly order with a local store for supply of locally farmed meat and fish products.
4. With regular supply of vegetables, vegetarian foods and supplements in my home already, the foundation of execution of the plan comes from having a phone to call in the order, a car to pick it up, and the resources at my fingertips. I might set a schedule for doing this, and even put it in my calendar. Thus I expect that on the first of every month I go pick up that meat and fish order, and every Sunday I plan my meals for the week that include vegetarian options.
5. With my plan in place, the rest is simple: just do it.

Step 3: Expect bumps in the road

Knowing what’s realistic in terms of the resources and abilities to reach your goal prepares you for the worst and allows you to react appropriately.  You know you have other demands in your life, such as your kids, your job, and life’s unexpected events, so build that right into your plan. Don’t make a plan that assumes you have 20 hours of free time per week and boundless energy if you don’t. Figure out instead how you’ll anticipate and accommodate interruptions, delays, squeezing in workouts between other commitments, etc. Plan for the worst, and you’ll be able to stick to that plan no matter what life throws at you. Plan only for the best and you’ll find yourself knocked off track by the slightest breeze.

Instead of approaching your goals with the attitude that success means staying on the perfect path, accept that there will be missed deadlines, setbacks, challenges and feelings of discouragement along the way. These are not failures in themselves, nor do they indicate failure with your goal – you can only truly fail if you quit before giving it your all, or from failing to try in the first place.

Acknowledge that you are taking a risk and have a Plan B, or even Plan C and D ready to keep you on track. It’s the bumps in the road that give you the opportunity for growth – every situation provides an opportunity for you to learn something about yourself that can guide you to do things a little differently in the future.

So long as you are working towards your goal and following a plan, you haven’t failed. Every step forward is a step in the right direction – whether big or small, they will eventually lead you to your goal. Just keep off the path of least persistence – either keep going or start again. But do something.

Step 4: Evaluate your progress

The SMART system of goal setting involves defining specific, measurable goals with an action based plan to achieve your goals in a realistic way and timeframe.

This aspect of measuring and assessing progress and then refining your approach accordingly is called outcome-based decision making, and it’s the basis for the Precision Nutrition system. As the PN manual describes:

Consider the idea of tracking key measurement variables. Doing so will help you in three distinct ways. First, it’ll help you see where progress is happening if it’s happening. Second, it’ll help you decide whether or not you should keep going as scheduled or whether changes are in order. And finally, it’ll help you stay in the driver’s seat with respect to your body.

And PN Expert Jeff Smith explains in PN Success Tip #6:

Often, we beat ourselves up because we think we’re not making progress. In almost every case, however, we are making tons of progress. We just haven’t tracked it, and so we don’t realize it.

Have a system in place to evaluate your progress regularly and frequently. This will keep you headed in the right direction and allow you to make adjustments to your plan before throwing in the towel.

Step 5: Be focused, yet flexible

Most people’s goals change over time and can change mid-stream. This is normal. You may have to modify your goals slightly; reprioritize and put them on the back burner for another day; or change your mind altogether. The key is to honestly evaluate where they fit in and not give up on goals so often that you never accomplish anything.

If you are going to make any resolution for 2009, commit to becoming an expert in the areas most important to you. By simply applying the same qualities and action steps that have led to other accomplishments in your life, you won’t leave room for anything but success.