Is Your Mind Right for a "New Year, New You?

Or…Are You A Psychological House of Cards Ready To Topple?

A "vision board" of goals that will likely go unfulfilled. PHOTO CREDIT: Time Magazine 12/29/22.

New Year’s resolutions are a holiday season staple for altering one’s fortunes and destiny for the forthcoming 365 days. It’s a natural inflection and reflection point to attempt to get your life on track to reach your goals you have always desired. 

A Naturally Ponderous Season When Auld Lang Syne breaks into heavy rotation around December 26th each year, introspective questions people typically contemplate can include…

What hard-earned lessons did I learn from this year? 

What painful pitfalls can I learn from?

What soaring successes can I build on?

What goals are new or of revitalized importance to me? 

What are my priorities for the coming year?

Practical But Important Goals Other goals maybe less cerebral, existential, or thought provoking in nature, but still can have massive impact on your daily life…

I need to read my Bible and pray to God more. 

I want to earn a 6-figure salary this year.

This will be the year I lose those stubborn 15 pounds.

I’m done with smoking cigarettes this time. I really mean it. 

It’s time to be more loving and patient with my partner. 

Nonetheless, most of these worthwhile goals fall by the wayside with alarming speed. In fact, only 9% manage to keep their New Year’s resolutions throughout the year, with a whopping 43% of people’s resolutions not even making it out of January and 80% dying an ignoble death by the 2nd week of February! 

Why Are We All Such Collective Losers? First, 70% of people don’t even bother to make new year’s resolutions, likely because after years of failed restarts and life relaunches, they eventually say, “F**k It”. The fear of failure — yet again — prevails. 

Some are too self-satisfied and smug to think they even need to change — yet I am SURE their spouse, partner, or live-in lover would disagree with their cocksure attitudes and myopic self-evaluation of the need for self-improvement. 

Besides those who failure averse or oblivious to their need to change, the rest are clueless to the psychological landmines and fallacies that blow up their most inspired attempts of lasting change come every New Year’s Eve.

Modifying Entrenched Behavior Patterns Is No Joke  It’s not just because you are undisciplined lazy, sh*t-talker that you don’t reach most of your goals — though make no mistake, your lackluster discipline its a prime reason for your failures. 

Chances are you figured you need to improve your will power, discipline, and overall perseverance to achieve goal nirvana. 

You are right. Most of us are too soft to achieve anything of consequence. 

Nonetheless, one should be aware of the root of your inability to apply will power, discipline, and perseverance is largely due to your faulty assumptions on success psychology and behavior modification.

Here are 10 Reality Checks that explain why you never achieve your goals, despite the best of intentions and gusto...

Here are 10 "Reality Checks" as to why you can't achieve jack sh*t!

1. Overreliance on Motivation. Motivation is a sugar high that dissolves quickly, while discipline is the protein foundation of change. Watching that artsy Instagram reel of the sexy dude with the 6 pack sweating furiously at a sunset beach workout in cool gear scored to pulsating hip hop can motivate most slackers to pledge to improve their fitness. 

Shocker! Real life is not as glamorous as portrayed on Instagram. It’s often cloudy, windy, and cold at the beach — if you find parking at all! You feel self-conscious when other fitter people your age prance by. Oh yeah, your new workout regime means you will be fighting peak rush hour traffic to get home. 

Solution — Start small. Plan out the logistics of a big routine change before committing to it.  If your goal is too drastic for your skill level or too logistically inconvenient with the rest of your life demands, you won’t stick to your new plan. 

Maybe a rugged beach workout is impractical for your skill or commitment level right now? Consider a sunset walk around the neighborhood with your beloved instead. Until you build up small wins to sustain enough momentum to ratchet up the challenge difficulty, baby steps might be a good place to start your new fitness journey.

2. Poor Understanding of Discipline.  Implementing discipline into longstanding problem areas can be ridiculously hard, tedious, boring, frustrating, and soul crushing. 

Discipline does not care about your feelings. It demands you resist your feelings for the greater good. 

Discipline makes you do the work, when you would rather do anything else. 

Discipline doesn’t need motivational fuel. In fact, it requires you trudge forward in the face of apathy, setbacks, and people not believing in you. 

Discipline involves you giving your best, even when your best sucks — just to maintain the positive habit that takes you 1% closer to your goal. 

Discipline is ultimately about doing what you don’t want to do NOW, but should do NOW — while ignoring all the rationalizations, logical reasons, and mental gymnastics begging you to procrastinate. 

Solution -Discipline is an intangible muscle that needs to be trained. Like conventional muscles, will power is at it’s highest when you are nourished and rested — and wanes throughout the day. Also, your discipline builds as you consistently overcome small challenges, akin to weak muscles becoming progressively strong with resistance training.

Expect challenges, difficulties, distractions — and yes copious amounts of failures, — when embarking on new challenges. Attempting to form new, positive habits that become 2nd nature, takes months (or years) of dedication, repetition, and positive reinforcement. 

Therefore, if you expect a certain amount failure like you would in attempting a new skill or sport, the inevitable disappointment won’t be so devastating when it happens, allowing you to bounce back quicker.

3. Sweeping Changes Set You Up To Fail.  I get it. We all want to be rich, sexy, and smart — YESTERDAY. Then, you hear the occasional successful “cold turkey” story, where someone gives up cigarettes one day for the rest of their lives after a lifetime of puffing, and suddenly went from a sickly, chain smoker to The Rock in terms of their fitness prowess. 

Don’t believe the hype. 

Only 3% to 5% of cold turkey quitters maintain long-term abstinence. 

Solution: Break down big goals into bite sized ones. You may yearn to lose 75 pounds, but you didn’t put that weight on overnight, so don’t expect the reverse to occur. Not only are smaller goals more achievable and allow you to build your self-esteem with small victories along the way, you intrinsically and slowly forge the good habits needed to sustain lasting change.

4. Your daily routine does not support your goals. Our daily routines form our habits, habits become interrelated behavior systems, and your systems either support or detract one from reaching your goal. Perhaps, your habitual 16 oz. soda craving before bed causes sleep issues that impede a new morning meditation goal or an overstuffed DVR competes with prayer time with God? 

Solution — Honestly appraise your current habits and systems to determine where change is needed. What bad habits and dysfunctional systems hold you back from reaching a particular goal? Maybe, you don’t have to cut something out completely, but this “vice” simply needs to be better regulated? Perhaps, a small fix will do the trick over a drastic overhaul you can’t commit to. 

In the above scenario, maybe you can still have the 16 oz. soda on the weekends, earlier in the day at lunch, or enjoy a decaffeinated version? 

To get more prayer time, take note of shows you didn’t watch within 7 or 14 days of airing. Maybe, you don’t have to sacrifice any TV time as you originally thought, but discovered other activities that are easier to excise from your routine to give yourself more prayer time? 

If your daily routine does not support your goals, you will be a salmon swimming upstream.

5. Your goal is unachievable. I may want washboard abs and be a middle-aged shirtless Instagram model, but I may enjoy 3-course dinners, after dinner blunts, and Grey Goose martinis too much to make this a real worthwhile goal to strive after.

Solution: Be honest with yourself with, “How bad do you want it?”. After deliberating, you might not want to pay the price of sacrifice for your desired goal. Your wife may be a Michelin-rated chef and those 3-course dinners are not only delicious, but the family bonding time that occurs during these meals, is more precious to you than the high you would get from social media vanity and the attention of anonymous “thirst traps”.

6. You have too many concurrent goals.  Much like it is unadvisable to work out every body part on a daily basis with no rest to become diesel, you will quickly deplete your discipline and energy resources if you want to become a “Renaissance Man” overnight by taking on too many goals at one time. 

Solution: Pick no more than the 3 most important and immediate goals per year and methodically plan what is needed to achieve said goals. This way you can go “all in” on these goals with great commitment and solid strategies, without falling into the trap of spreading yourself too thin to achieve anything consequential.

7. You have not defined your reason “why” for your goal. Embarking on a new goal is in effect starting a new journey. Why exactly do you want to slay the dragon? Did the dragon abduct your mother, kill your father, or do you want to kill the dragon for sport? The reasoning can make a real difference in terms of stick-to-itiveness required to endure the valleys and storms in pursuing a lofty goal. 

Solution: Figure out what your real motivation is. Maybe you want to lose 15 pounds to look good in the club or in your underwear on Tinder vs. the proven (but yawn-inducing) health reasons for sensible weight maintenance. Who cares if your friends think that losing weight to get laid is a superficial reason?  If that reason is enough for you, it’s enough period. 

Once you engage deep contemplation, you will see some of your reasons for wanting something maybe more about people pleasing, status seeking, or “Keeping up with the Joneses” — and less about something you really want for it’s own intrinsic value. 

Once you determine your “why”, it becomes the gauge and basis for how deeply committed you are to achieving that goal. With no solid “why”, you are rudderless, and will no longer be able to justify the sacrifices required to attain this goal.

8. You have not planned out the logistics for goal achievement. Goal attainment rarely occurs organically. Do you have the right people, resources, time, energy, or mentality to achieve your goal? Once you know your “why” for wanting to pursue a goal, determining “how” you can achieve a goal is even more important. 

Solution: Methodically plan what is needed to achieve your goals.  Think through how you want to accomplish your resolution and how long it might take to reach your goal. How much can you invest in pursuing this goal? Write a proper plan with thoughtful analysis to better predict obstacles, formulate strategies to combat obstacles, and accumulate the proper resources to see your goal through to the end.

9. Your goals are unspecific. Worthwhile goals of learning a new language, being more patient with your kids, or starting a business are too big and undefined for you to tackle. There’s no measurable factor to determine if you succeeded or not. What exactly will success look like when you achieve it?

Solution: Be ridiculously detailed in your goal-setting and what a successful outcome looks like. A simple modification for the above vague goals will provide clarity on if you achieved your desired goal. Furthermore, clarity helps you identify and measure ways to ascertain what successful goal achievement means to you.

Replace your nebulous goals and dreams with concrete language to better achieve them:

• I will listen to Rosetta Stone’s audiobook 3 days a week during my PM commute to be conversationally proficient in French by next year.

• I will count to 10 or simply disengage when I am too stressed out, before I harshly react by screaming at my kids for being annoying.

• I will start saving 5% of my paycheck for the next 6 months to buy my first office vending machine.
  

10. You are unaccountable to anybody. Often, it’s easier to let yourself down than it is to disappoint loved ones depending on you. If nobody is aware of your goals and nobody else is tracking your progress, it’s easy to put a tough, inconvenient goal on the perpetual backburner when distractions and temptations arise. 

Solution: Get an “Accountability Buddy”. When you lean on your support system, they can get you through times of low energy and poor resolve. In other cases, such as participating in strenuous hiking group, the social pressure to keep your appointments — can empower you through a crisis of willpower — to an meet an unpleasant, but fulfilling goal. As social beings, most of us function better with a community around us.

Conclusion People routinely fail on achieving their new year’s resolutions for a variety of factors. Overreliance on motivation, not understanding what the scope discipline really entails, unrealistic expectations, and overall poor planning sabotage the best of self-improvement intentions. 

This leaves is feeling bad about ourselves. As we feel bad ourselves, we convince ourselves “to try a little harder” next year. Alas, when we unwittingly repeat the same mistakes in spite of our “best efforts”, we doom ourselves to the same outcome, killing our spirit along the way. 

Eventually, nearly 3/4 of Americans stop making resolutions and become resigned to their lot in life. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. 

Get out of your own way. 

With honest self analysis and pragmatic planning, combined with understanding the psychology behind behavior change and goal attainment, you can become the best version of yourself you have always dreamed of being!

Even if you only aspire to be a vacuous, sexy Instagram model :)

Mario Rodriguez has 1.1 million followers on Instagram. You may want Rodriguez's 1.1 million followers, but have you charted out what it takes to procure such a large fan base on social media?