Here's What To Do If You Feel Like You've Failed Your New Year’s Resolution

goal setting

It’s nearing the end of February already, and nearly into March, so this is one of your last opportunities to get back on track with your New Year’s resolutions. You know how it is - every year in January, the gyms and yoga studios are packed. New diets and cleanses are in full swing.

But by February 1st, the average person has already given up and moved on. In fact, studies show that more than 20 percent of people give up on their resolutions after just a week.

So, how can we change that? Listen, if you gave up, or if you’re thinking about giving up, This message today is for you! Here's what to do if you feel like you've failed your New Year's resolution.

Resistance is intrinsic to change. If you feel like you didn’t make it and fell out of grace with your New Year’s resolution, that doesn’t make you a failure. It simply means that you’re running into some challenges and just going over some speed bumps right now. You are not a failure, unless you completely give up.

And I know you want to avoid doing that!

There are a lot of resistance points anytime you would like to bring about change in your life. That's why change is hard. It’s an obstacle we’re likely to face whether our desired change is small (like drinking an extra glass of water in the morning) or large (like quitting smoking or starting a new job). Your body and your mind both want you to continue to follow those ingrained routines, firing off a reward pathway activated in the brain by releasing dopamine. Performing a habit, good or bad, feels good because that dopamine release feels good. And so that pattern becomes chemically ingrained and difficult to break in light of being rewarded with more and more dopamine.

So, when January 1st came, it wasn’t like some magic happened that day and erased all of your routines and your habits. You’re fighting all of those physical, chemical and emotional attachments that cause you to want you to stick with your old habits, rather than to get back on track with your resolution. In a sense, then, parts of our brains are working against us when we try to overcome bad habits.

But you made the resolution because you wanted to change something. Whether it was to go to the gym, eat fewer processed foods and sugar, stop drinking and smoking, stretch and meditate more, read more books, or work on your relationship, you wanted to change that something for a reason that's important to you. The good news is that humans aren't just creatures of habit. In fact, there are many areas of the brain that help us do what’s best for our health and well-being.

Just be aware that when you hit that resistance point and you’re thinking about giving up, one way to get back on track is to remember the reason you wanted to change in the first place. The why behind that reason is something to connect with on a regular basis. Your why is about knowing your purpose. You'll be most motivated when you are consistently aligning your actions to be congruent with your purpose. In that scenario, the motivation comes easily!

And so now it’s important to think about why you might be struggling. Why now? There can be many reasons why. Sometimes, the reality is that we often underestimate how hard change really is. In meeting with my coaching clients, for example, we’ll talk about how important just moving for 20 minutes a day can be to your mental and physical health. And having been a science teacher, I’ll always point out Newton’s first Law of Motion - you know it, too: A body in motion tends to stay in motion. Incidentally, the opposite is true too - a body at rest tends to stay at rest. And so, it’s not just a law that lives in physics because, of course, we are faced with the same laws in our own lives. You have your routines and habits. They’re comfortable to you and because they’re already in motion, it’s difficult to change that familiar motion. Starting from the moment you wake up in the morning when you’re still lying in bed and thinking about how great and warm the bed feels, wondering why anyone would ever want to get up from this?

But if all we did in life was lay in bed instead of doing important and meaningful things and experiencing them, what value would life have for you?

Positive and Negative Motivational Drivers. When you think about the change you want to make, you know it’s going to be hard. You know that you will need to get motivated to see yourself through over the long run. Let me just say that good long term motivators are not focused on what you don’t want. That’s because real change takes time, and your inspiration and motivation will run out if and when you don’t see quick wins. So, if you’re trying to inspire yourself by saying that “I want to do this because I don’t like how I am now,” or “I hate my body,” you’re setting yourself up to fail because your body or your mindset or whatever it is that you want to change will take time for that to come about.

So, rather than focusing on negative motivators, consider instead the positive motivation of achieving your future best self, the one you are trying to become. That long term vision is the impetus to form new habits. And here’s a success secret for you to continuously remind yourself that most lasting change happens incrementally, one or two steps at a time. That's because new routines and habits emerge slowly as they're usually working against your previous ones. Working with a great coach can help you to anticipate and understand the difficulty of behavior change by helping you to breaking your goals down and holding you accountable to reaching them. Having those safeguards in place means your goals become more manageable ones so that you can string together many small successes that add up over time.

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And don't forget to celebrate all your wins. Small rewards have been shown to be great motivators. Rewards act as a positive reinforcement, and as a result, we tend to continue pressing on towards our goals. So important to recognize even those small achievements because they add up over time.

That’s how you stick to and make a resolution successful!

Don't Give Up! Finally, no matter what you do, don’t give up! Even if you've already "threw the towel in", you haven't yet truly missed your opportunity because you can start again whenever you’re ready.

You can start today, right now. So, you haven’t yet failed. You want the best for you because that’s what you deserve, and you're just going through a rough patch. Be sure that you have written your goal down, take action daily to move towards it, and then always celebrate your wins, big or small. Seek out the support to hold you accountable to getting there and by the end of the year, you’ll have made great progress, and you’ll be happy.

You may have heard me quote John Maxwell’s book “Failing Forward” which talks about trying and failing and then trying and failing again better the next time.” And that’s essentially how progress in life is made. Unsuccessful people characteristically give up after they fail. But the secrets of successful people are exactly the opposite. And that’s why they’re successful! They don’t give up. Rather, they continue to try and fail a little better each time.

It’s like climbing a mountain - it takes one step after the other. But most people give up when they’re only at base camp. Don't let that be you!

Damien Vanderburg is a small business consultant and a certified high performance coach with a focus on personal development, high price-point sales and entrepreneurship. With more than 20 years experience teaching, training and developing high performers, Damien helps those who want to transform effectiveness, maximize potential and accelerate results. He is also the co-founder of Counterpoint Test Prep, a test prep and college app consulting company.

Go to www.damienvanderburg.com and learn more.

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