Ten days into January 2023, and studies have shown that almost half of those who have made a New Years’ Resolution will have abandoned it. By the end of the month, the overwhelming majority will have failed at their goal. Why is this?
Part of the reason is that New Years’ Resolutions encourage a narrow focus on a goal without a plan to achieve that goal. While it’s possible to achieve something by ‘dumb luck’, most of the time, that isn’t how the world works. We need more than a goal but a roadmap for getting there.
If you were planning a road trip from New York to Miami, you wouldn’t just set off from Manhattan and drive south hoping for the best because that approach introduces all sorts of potential problems. Without planning such a journey, you could easily find yourself fifty miles from anywhere without food, water, or fuel. You’d also likely find the trip incredibly dull because you wouldn’t have established any milestones to afford you a sense of accomplishment along the way.
When most of us adopt a New Years’ Resolution, that’s effectively what we’re doing; setting a destination but making no plan for how we get there. Without a roadmap, the best we can do is try to ‘wing it’, which rarely results in success. Such resolutions also lack specifics, such as a deadline; even if we set a deadline, it becomes too easy for us to keep shifting it further away.
Ultimately, our New Years’ Resolutions lack accountability. It’s easy to tell yourself you’re going to do something, but it’s even easier to come up with a hundred reasons not to do it and to make excuses for ourselves.
Let’s imagine, for example, that you set a goal of reading twelve novels by the end of the year at a pace of one novel a month. By the end of January, you’ve read a couple of chapters. You can tell yourself that’s fine; you were busier than expected and didn’t have the time, so you’ll catch up in February. Once February is finished, and you’re even further behind your goal, you’ll just tell yourself the same thing again until, eventually, you’ll reach a point where the goal seems unobtainable. Still, it doesn’t really matter because you’re only accountable to yourself, so you can make an extra effort next year instead.
When it comes to a simple thing like reading more, it doesn’t particularly matter whether you reach the goal or not. However, some people set career goals. How many times have we said, “This year will be my year!” and by the end of the year, it wasn’t really your year? On December 31st, you’re still in the same position you were on January 1st. We can, and we do, make the same excuses: ‘I was busier than I expected’, ‘I didn’t have the time’, ‘Things didn’t click for me’, ‘I’ll do it next year’.
Once again, that early burst of determination and excitement hits the wall of reality, and because you’ve not planned ahead, you haven’t got a ladder to help you get over it. Similarly, because you’re not accountable to anybody else, you can reason yourself into acceptance of the situation even if, deep down, you know that you’re missing out on something that could improve your life, well-being, and happiness considerably.
Those effective and permanent beneficial changes to your career path are rarely a case of saying, ‘I’m going to do X’ and then just doing it. To overcome this cycle of ambition giving way to acceptance, you might want to consider investing in yourself by investing in individual coaching services that will not only provide encouragement and support but help you with drawing up a roadmap for achieving your goals. Importantly, a coach offers accountability. You’ll have somebody there for each step of your journey to question and challenge you positively so that you can’t simply brush off each setback with a comforting but defeatist line.
If you’ve noticed that you struggle to find the ladder to help you get over the various obstacles life throws at you, and you’re tired of simply settling then consider contacting us, or visiting robinlinescoaching.com to see whether we might be able to offer some vital assistance along your career path.
Don’t feel the need to settle when a simple investment in yourself today can reap huge rewards in the coming years.
