Forbes Coaches Council Post: Avoiding 'Quitters Day': Four Ways To Ditch Resolutions And Cultivate Real Change This Year
Randi Braun is a member of the Forbes Coaches Council, where this post was first published on Forbes.com. Randi is the CEO of Something Major and the Wall Street Journal Bestselling author of Something Major: The New Playbook for Women at Work.
It’s called Quitters Day. It’s the day each year (the second Friday in January) by which time most Americans will have quit their New Year’s resolutions.
That’s because resolutions don’t work: They’re bold declarations that may sound fabulous with a glass of champagne in our hands at a New Year’s Eve party, but they rarely lead to the transformation we’re longing for. Instead of setting resolutions just to quit them, below are four strategies to help you cultivate real change this year.
1. Be specific.
There's a common mantra in business that “what gets measured gets done,” and the same is true for creating real change in our lives. It’s impossible to achieve our goals if we don’t name them.
Consider the common resolution of “getting my finances in better shape.” What does that even mean? Is it setting a budget, saving more for retirement, shopping less or something completely different?
Getting clear about what we want to say yes to enables us to make a clear action plan, including concrete next steps, while a lack of specificity in our goals conveniently lets us hide out from the hard work of pursuing them. If you’re not sure where to start this year, you can break down your goals by considering questions like: What do I want more of/less of in my personal life this year? In my work life? The answers to those questions are your goals, and they can be as big as “scoring my dream job” or as small as “getting outside more.”
Once you have a list of specific goals, choose just one to three max for the year to keep your goals more achievable and less overwhelming. Remember, as the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously said, “You can’t have it all, all at once,” so prioritize just a few areas of focus that you will commit to investing your time and energy into.
2. Choose optimization, not remediation..
One of the biggest mistakes we make when focusing on our goals is fixing the negative instead of cultivating the positive. Take, for example, one of the most popular resolutions Americans will make this year, “improving fitness.”
Setting aside my issues with toxic diet culture, now consider the difference between losing weight (the remediation mindset) versus getting healthier (the optimization mindset). Not only does getting healthy just feel more positive, but Gallup research shows that a strengths-optimization mindset consistently outperforms a weakness-remediation mindset.
As leadership expert Marcus Buckingham explains, “All apologies to Madonna, but we are living in a remedial [not material] world. [...] If you're not really careful, you get people's minds thinking much more about failure prevention than about soaring.”
Whether your goals are to get healthier, make a professional pivot or pursue a personal project, take a moment to revisit that list from step #1 and reframe from remediation to optimization: for example, turning “I have to get out of this job!” (remediation) to “I’d love to find a job that is more fulfilling to me” (optimization).
The optimization mindset is full of the “get-to” and “want-to” moments that sustain our progress, while the remediation mindset is full of the dreaded “shoulds” and “have-to’s” that make us feel like we’ve failed before we’ve even started.
3. Make your goals a contact sport.
We often make our goals a solitary endeavor instead of what I call a "contact sport," and that’s a mistake.
The fastest way to discover or achieve your goals is to get out of the brainstorming document and into conversation with other people. It’s tempting to stay quiet about our aspirations when they feel nascent, big or just scary. We don’t want to be judged for wanting to switch industries but not knowing where to start. We don’t want to waste people’s time until we have our business plan “more thought out” for that side hustle we’ve been dreaming about for years.
But that lack of full clarity is exactly why we want to put our goals in contact with other people while they’re still being formulated: Odds are somebody in your network has the answer, the idea or the introduction that is exactly the catalyst you needed to move forward. Letting other people into our goals is a crucial part of the formulation and achievement process, keeping us supported and accountable.
4. Treat goals like a fine wine, not a keg stand.
My final piece of advice is to treat your goals like a fine wine instead of a keg stand. Let me explain:
Too often, when we identify a goal, we run hard at it. That can be awesome, but sometimes it can be the equivalent of doing a keg stand. It seems like a good idea in the moment, and you get a rush... but the next day, you wake up with a massive hangover and bloated belly, wondering why you even thought you liked beer in the first place.
Instead, treat your goals like a fine wine—sipping and savoring them over time. Instead of the do-it-all-at-once keg stand approach, it’s about taking small steps (think of this as sipping). It’s that small action of signing up for a class, blocking time on your calendar for a personal project or sending that networking email you’ve been procrastinating. Small choices about what we say yes and no to add up to big results.
So does celebrating the small wins along the way: Think of this as the savoring part. Just like you'd savor a glass of fine wine, research shows that celebrating "small wins"—like getting the first-round interview even if you don't get the job or reading the first few pages of a book before you finish it—sustains motivation over time.
Final Thoughts
Remember that goals are hard. Otherwise, we’d call them "things I did last year." Whether the changes you’re yearning for are personal or professional, I hope these four tips will help you design better goals and stay the course.
Randi Braun is a certified executive coach and the author of Something Major: The New Playbook for Women at Work. Get in touch with Randi via email or social (below). Copyright 2023. All rights reserved.