New Year, New Me: Momentum in Disguise?
On Dec 31st, nothing magical happened between 23:59 and 00:01
“3…2…1… Happy New Year! Time to start building a new me!”
Is that so?
Like Christmas, New Year’s Eve is a meaningful event to celebrate life. Before midnight, we hit “play” on the year’s retrospective and be grateful for what we have and what we accomplished. This is also the time, close to family and friends, where we feel energized to create a “New Year, New Me” plan to tackle our goals and desires.
But what’s the impact of New Year’s Eve’s “energy rush” over the upcoming days, weeks or months? Well, close to zero, I might say. A Scranton University study found out only 19% of individuals keep their resolutions and mid-January abandons most.
This energy rush works as well as a sugar spike if you indulge in your favorite Dunkin donut. You feel good for a moment (dopamine circulating all around), you have an instant source of energy for 30–40min and then… you come back to your original state. And this is key when you look into goal accomplishment: if you want to be successful, you cannot afford ‘momentum in disguise.’ In other words, avoid momentaneous motivation boosters not founded by a consistent will, mindset and routine, because they work fine when you are on a “high.” Still, if you are on a “low,” it will be much harder to recover, probably leading you to quit.
Every year, nothing magical happens on Dec 31st, between 23:59 and 00:01. Angels will not come down on Earth and carry you on their shoulders as a new “Champion of Change.” So, allow me to bring some insights about what may work for you if you want to be successful on your goals:
#1 Break the Cycle:
You need to do the following questions:
- Why do we restrict ourselves to make goal planning based on a civil year?
- Why start several disruptions in my life only on Jan 1st?
- Why start them all at once?
Trying to do everything at once may be a recipe for disaster. Don’t forget we, humans, are creatures of habits. From a psychological standpoint, “a habit is a more or less fixed way of thinking, willing or feeling acquired through previous repetition of a mental experience.”
If changing yourself goes hand in hand with disruptive processes, what do you think they will do to your habits? They will crush them. Too many changes in a short time period will trigger the acute stress response, a.k.a “fight-or-flight.” And this is one of the main reasons people drop out of their goals 2–3 weeks after the year starts. You will feel overwhelmed with many things out of your comfort zone that you may either A) fight the plan constantly and become a bitter, demotivated person or B) fly to whatever steady-state you had before the change.
What you should do: know your triggers and act in real-time. Did you need New Year’s Eve to decide you hated your job or you need to lose weight? Probably not, right? So when your mind clicks and says to you, “you gotta change something”, that’s the time to act upon; don’t wait or postpone. When this happens, you wink at your intrinsic motivation: you do things for the sake of doing things. You’re not only ‘surfing’ the hype of an event like New Year’s Eve.
#2 Understand Change:
It’s a cliche: people want change but usually don’t want to change. And for some, the friction on wanting to change depends on some misconceptions regarding the change itself. Although it’s true change results in dissatisfaction with the status quo, their origin and execution may differ. Some are programmed, others unplanned; some depend solely on us, others depend on external parties; some are accomplished with our current skillset, others require a new one; some are straightforward to achieve, others with strong dependencies.
If you want a new job, there’s a high chance you may need an improved skillset to make you stand out; if you want to kick off a startup, you may need a bank to support the investment; if a pandemic hits you, you may re-think your business to survive uncharted waters. These are different examples of how your ecosystem heavily influences change. Even if the outcome of such scenarios is unforeseen, you may acknowledge anticipating some needs/actions may harness your ability to change.
What you should do: understand your background, your surroundings and available resources. Learn to accept the unexpected but don’t cope well with navigation at plain sight, since you don’t fully control your ecosystem but you can maneuver your decisions to make it receptive to change.
#3 Build Willpower:
Like Simon Sinek usually says, “you need to find your why.” What energizes you every single day, what makes you out of bed on a cold morning, what brings purpose to your life. If you know how your engine works, it will be easier to fine-tune.
Once you get your “Why” straight, it’s easier to build the yellow brick road towards your Wizard of Oz (whatever it might be). During the endeavor, you may be tempted to go off-road or to go back to a previous road stop. In dark times, you may even scream “Enough!” when your mind, body and soul are just too tired to continue. Those are the moments when the strongest will and a resilient mindset will help you go over.
What you should do: Your willpower will be as strong as your ability to manage stressful situations. And unfortunately, there’s no good recommendation to achieve this besides putting yourself inside of the’ hurricane.’ Everything that takes you out of your comfort zone creates stress (physical or psychological) and you need to survive in this scenario without the “fight-or-flight” rule. Figuratively, your willpower is like muscular hypertrophy: you submit your muscle (willpower) to a given tension, which generates physical stress. When this happens, the muscle fibers are destroyed and then reconstructed better, so a future tension doesn’t create the same impact for the body.
Once you cope well with stress, you should invest in bringing extra awareness for your current self and build your self-affirmation. You can achieve it by understanding your limitations and build a thoughtful approach to your actions. This means using the right wording. E.g., “I don’t” rather than “I can’t”:
(me on a straight diet)
Waiter: “Would you like a slice of our famous apple pie?”
Me: “I don’t want the slice. Thank you.”
This answer builds empowerment — I decided not to eat it. Saying “I can’t eat a slice” takes accountability away from my own decision, passing a dissimulated message of “I really would like one slice but other factors are blocking me from doing so.” So let’s cut the crap: there are no other “factors”… Only your will to do or not what is right.
Last but not least, embrace failure. Your willpower will not be at 100% all the time and there will be times when you drop the ball. When that happens, don’t enter a negative spiral of resentment; inspect your failure, have lessons learned and adapt yourself for a future situation.
#4 Create a powerful routine:
A routine is not something you get right the first time you think about it, between a flute of champagne and some raisins on New Year’s Eve. Once you get your motivators right, you need to work smarter and not harder. You need to forecast, prioritize and assess your results on a day-by-day basis. It’s key not to get demotivated if you don’t get immediate results because we’re training for a marathon, not a sprint.
One knows how important it is to celebrate minor accomplishments if (s)he already ran a marathon: it’s not about the remaining 20km to go but those last 0.5km you did against all odds. In the beginning, it’s hard to acquire new behaviors but once you master them, they will become your new habits under a balanced state in which your mind, body and soul live well.
What you should do: engage in small activities which will then become new habits. Inspect and adapt your progress frequently. Celebrate small accomplishments to build momentum and give yourself a positive sign you are on the right track.
If you are still skeptical, don’t take me for granted; put some of these insights into practice and analyze your results. At the end of the day, I’m just an ordinary guy with an ordinary life. I assume, foremost, my own average capacity to deal with adversity and accomplish something. But I can tell you the previous insights brought a better version of myself since I started using them some years ago. Don’t fool yourself with quick results or magical frameworks to bring you close to the “Steve Jobs” level everyone nowadays looks at the internet. You need to try out things and see what works best for you.
