WELCOME TO 2021!!! 

And to kick off another year of podcasting I thought I’d take a look at that age old tradition of making New Years Resolutions…..or rather why you shouldn’t bother. 

I wanted to look at why soooo many people fail their resolutions and an alternative method that I use and you might find more successful!

Mentioned is a previous episode that you can find right here: What SMART Goals are DUMB

Keep Occupied

Brock
@brockcookOT
brock.cook@me.com

Episode Transcript

00:00:00 – 00:05:11

Hi and welcome to 20 21. You made it congratulations that alone after last year is a massive success month. So Props to you, but are you one of the 74% of people that is thinking of setting some New Year’s resolutions? Well, let’s have a chat and make sure that you’re not part of the eighty percent of people who don’t usually succeed with said resolutions.

New Year’s resolutions we’ve all heard of them most of us have probably sat them at one point or another very few of us have actually succeeded in completing any of the resolutions that we set but why is that and what can we do or what can we drive it’s a little bit different to make sure that we are actually progressing along this journey of self improvement that we are self-imposing on ourselves every 1st of January So it’s important to sort of know that despite 74% roughly in the US of people wanting to set nice resolutions this still 80ish percent of those people that are going to fail them and that’s a massive fail rate, which makes you wonder like why I’m not doing it. What is the purpose we All have these things in us or about us or around us that we want to change that we want to improve sometimes. It’s health-related. Sometimes it’s career-related. Sometimes it’s money related. But every single person has something that they would love to improve upon in that lives. Now for some reason it’s a it seems to be a cultural thing. We’ve been brought up with this belief that the start of the new year is this magical time, when all of a sudden boom, we can start fresh start clean everything that we’ve sort of patterned and built up to that point no longer affects us and we can only choose what we’re going to change or what we’re going to do better at in the new year. It all sounds wonderful on paper and I wish I could tell you that that’s exactly how it worked. But unfortunately, we can’t instantly regained right all of our patterns in our history at the the tick of The Twelve o’clock. Unfortunately, it would be much easier if we could change now for most people the majority of their New Year’s resolutions tend to be health-related seconded by self-improvement type goals off. It’s interesting that. The younger generation so jensy is much higher percentage of them actually wanting to or anticipating setting New Year’s resolutions. And as you go through the generations towards the older Generations the Baby Boomers and so on that gradually gets less and less and I’m only predict or I can only sort of guess that that’s because they failed a number of times during their younger years wage at actually completing some of these resolutions and that Honda wears on you. I would imagine so down baby boomers where it’s sort of only about 60% of people are going to set New Year’s resolutions for 20 21 Jen’s. He’s offered that 92% So there’s a massive difference dead. They just young and fresh and hasn’t been haven’t had the life beaten out of them yet. So that’s quite interesting. one of the one of the reasons that it’s I guess hypothesized that resolutions don’t necessarily work for the vast majority of people.

00:05:11 – 00:10:50

Is it there there’s a broad it’s I want to improve my health. I want to make more money or be better better manage my money maybe off the really broad. There’s no guidance. There’s no reflection on what the actual issues regarding that are or anything like that. And yes, we know as though T’s that wage. Generally what you would do. If you came across a client with said resolution or goal that you would then go through and break it down and turn it own no manageable steps, but unfortunately the I guess the culture around New Year’s resolution isn’t to do that. It’s just Going to improve my health New Year comes around and boom will buy gym membership for the year and we’ll go for days and waste the rest of it off. What can we actually do? Like, why are we setting these big wish statements? I I think that one of the reasons that that fails is just abroad but sometimes they’re also somewhat Out Of Reach for that point in time for the person which isn’t a bad thing off. I’ll get to that scene. It’s not a bad thing. But because there’s no breakdown of that goal. We don’t know we don’t know that okay. I don’t actually have the skillset yet to be able to complete this resolution. So how am I actually going to do it? Skill sets such as discipline or willpower, which I’m sure many of you will attest really really important when it comes to setting things like exercise goals, like going to the gym or nutrition goals, like, you know, eating healthy eating more vegetables, whatever your goal might be the the soft skills of discipline and willpower a massive and probably the one thing that gets overlooked every single time. Those of you who have listened to this podcast for a very long time now may recall me doing an episode way back. Like eighty Nine episodes episode 7 about smart goal. And I’m going to touch on a little bit of that now while we’re discussing this so one like I said earlier one of the things the needs to happen if someone’s going to make this sort of life-changing decision is it needs to be broken down? It can’t just sit there as this massive on a pedestal life-altering a call on its own and expect to be completed expect to be engaged in and expect to actually happen. So we need to break down now what most people’s defaults would be would be to break it down into smaller goals and I would Hazard a guess that ninety percent of them would recommend writing them are smart goals Now interesting enough. I spoke about in that episode that the sort of the actual purpose of smart goals and what they’re best suited for home. So I spoke about how they are best suited to do things that you already know you can do but you want to be able to do them with more efficiency and speed and efficiency and teamwork if it’s a big group thing that kind of thing. So there are actually things that smart goals may help with and if your resolution is something that you’ve done before or something that you are hundred percent know you can do then there’s the potential that smart goals may actually help you achieve that but given that we seem to be relying on the magic power of January 1st. I’m going to assume for the rest of this episode that wage You’re actually wanting to change about yourself is something that you either have never attempted before or have never attempted successfully before faith in that that tends to be where most people put their wish list for things that they would like to improve about themselves. So I’m not going to look at smart goals as a valid a valid method of achieving these resolutions, but if you would like to jump back to episode info Link in the show notes if you want to have a listen and hear about those So one method that I’ve been using for a number of years now and I believe it was Melinda Gates Bill Gates as wife who I first heard about it in an article where she was being interviewed was too choosy a word or I’ve sort of wage isn’t it to a phrase for the for the upcoming year? So rather than picking something, you know, I guess a negative thing.

00:10:50 – 00:15:14

Generally. That’s the thing that we want to change event as well as is the negative. So what we perceive is the negatives so rather than starting the year off looking at the negatives and what we don’t like about ourselves. I choose a word or a phrase that I want to essentially live that year by and what happens is I don’t for me personally. I don’t tend to set very hard specific job. Dolls of round achieving that it’s simply making me aware of when opportunities around that word or phrase present themselves so that I’m ready to dive into them. So for example, a couple of years ago, I had all the words that I chose was minimalism. So whenever I was looking at purchasing things whenever I was say cleaning out a cupboard in my in my house and my office minimalism was my focus and because it was something that I had been thinking about I had been researching about I had it sort of front of mind it made it very easy for me to incorporate that into any decisions that I’m day-to-day. I ended up clearing out a lot of the Clutter that you know, most people just have rubbish stored not rubbish rubbish, but like useless app Things that I’ve haven’t looked at in years or used in years stored in drawers and cupboards all over the house. I managed to get rid of part of that stuff. I had recently not been the greatest with money but focusing on minimalism and focusing on minimalism when I was actually purchasing things made a massive impact on my decision making and that sort of thing. So another year last year. In fact 2019 my phrase for that year was dead choose adventure ordinance our new adventures. So what I wanted was I had a friend a very good friend who had moved to my city for 12 months and in showing her around and doing all the touristy type things when she first arrived it sort of showed me how little I had actually done