It’s two months until the new year begins. When January 1st rolls around, many people throughout the world will be making New Year’s Resolutions. A high percentage of those resolutions will fail.
While there are a lot of reasons why people are unsuccessful in keeping their resolutions, including a lack of serious motivation or choosing a behavior change to please other people rather than one’s self, a major impediment to success occurs because of lack of practice.
Learning any new skill requires practice, and making a behavior change actually involves learning a new skill. As strange as it may sound, people don’t automatically know how to to stop smoking or build exercise into their schedules or spend more time with their families or save money. That’s where practice enters the picture.
The final two months of the year can be thought of as a time to practice the behavior changes that you would like to make next year. Without the pressure of a formal resolution, we can – for example – try a new schedule that permits time for exercise or provides evenings without bringing work home so that we can spend more time with our loved ones. We can see whether we can make the switch to healthier eating by giving up desserts or sodas or avoiding eating between meals.
Whatever type of resolution you may be considering, you can figure out a way of practicing that will enable you to appreciate the impediments that you will face – which will, in turn, enable you modify your desired behavior change based upon what you’ve learned during the course of your practice.
Practicing a new skill without pressure and without the expectation of immediate perfection can help us make New Year’s Resolutions with more confidence and with a greater chance of choosing a behavior change that will have a good chance of success.