Do you make resolutions? More importantly, do you keep them?
According to researchers, nearly 80% of people abandon their New Year’s resolutions by February. Sometimes the annual business or departmental planning can be susceptible to the same pitfalls for failure as our good intentions made at midnight January 1. So, if you have plans to pivot and adapt this year and you’re struggling to keep the motivation going, or even to get started, you’re not alone. The good news is there are things you can do to shore up your resolve and set yourself up for success.
First, set SMART goals.
We’ve all heard about making our goals SMART. Specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely or timebound. These are great attributes for any goal and a good system for knowing when you’ve made it. These highly crafted goals are perfect, but they don’t always succeed. And sometimes they are abandoned outright. That’s because the problem isn’t with the goal. It’s with the behavior that supports the goal that can a hindrance.
Implementation is an action-based process. While strategizing and goal setting are mental activities. It’s stimulating to imagine a goal achieved and the rewards of success and then map out plans to carry out the vision. However, it is the behavioral changes required to implement these plans that cause trouble to many undertakings. So, supporting the action steps that must be enacted to achieve your goals is vital to your ultimate success.
Adopt a success strategy that supports behavioral change.
Your goals (and New Year’s resolutions, too) depend upon changing your behavior. Whether it’s about ceasing a behavior, amplifying a behavior, or establishing a new behavior, taking different actions and adopting different activities are essential for effecting change. “Knowledge is Power,” Says Thomas Jefferson, but action creates change. We create goals and resolutions because we want to change or improve the outcome from what we currently have. A goal is often the result of a thorough assessment of how we’re doing and recognizing opportunities to do better.
Framing the SMART goals in a way that helps ensure success is a smart move, too, but how?
Employ the Three A’s:
Behavioral science studies show the chances of making change happen are increased by having three key ingredients:
- Affinity
- Approval
- Ability
When these components work together there is a much greater chance of success. Critical to this process is having an honest assessment of the talents, tools, and resources available to you. Whether it’s just you or includes your whole team, checking all three boxes is integral to successful action which enables a successful outcome and change in circumstance.
Affinity for the goal
Affinity is a spontaneous or natural liking for a certain thing. It is something liked or admired. It may be something you’re good at and enjoy. It makes sense that you’ll have a better chance at actually doing something you like doing. And it’s especially so if you have a particular talent to employ.
To assess your affinity for the behaviors needed to succeed at your goal, ask yourself these questions :
- Is this a behavior that you or a member of your team is drawn to or admire?
- Is this something that resonates with you and that you want to do?
If you answer yes to these questions, move on to the next attribute. If not, you should be careful about trying to do something unsavory to you, or your team. It may drain your energy and the motivation is certain to fail. However, if you have other resources, you could rent the behavior–at least in a business situation. If your goal is to get a lean and tone physique, you can’t get someone to do it for you.
And once you get started momentum is a precious thing. A body in motion will stay in motion until some equal and opposite force stops it. An inequal and opposite force will drag it down and eventually stop it. Like a thrown ball that eventually drops to the earth. So make certain you have an affinity for the behavior as the first step on the path to achieving any goal.
Approval of the desired behavior
Approval of the desired behavior (not just its intended result) and believing that others will approve of it too is essential. It has to be something desirable. Something that makes a positive impact. Something you’re proud of. Something of worth. The personal buy-in means that the desired behavior aligns with your ideals and values and makes it easier to stick with it when the going inevitably gets tough.
And don’t forget the motivation to be had by the approval of others. It is an enormous factor in behavioral change. Humans need to be validated by others. Significant ones like our family, our community, and peers are most influential. And so is approval from our audience on social media. This approval becomes social proof of the virtue of your efforts. But beware of constantly trying to please others. Doing so at your own expense is taking approval too far. Instead, seek to gain the approval of people whose opinions you trust and value. Trusted approval–even critique and advice–can take you far on your path to success.
Ability to perform the desired behavior
Ability is the combination of necessary skills and the available resources to learn or practice the desired behavior. Repeated performance of the behavior is a key indicator of success. Being able and ready for action can get things moving. If the behavior is to be learned or acquired, it may cause the achievement of your goal to take longer.
The sweet spot of goal success
Here’s my own process of assessing my resolve:
- Approval: I think staying in touch with associates, clients, and prospects is important to a healthy business and life.
- Affinity: I like to communicate and engage with people and want to invest my time in communicating value others.
- Ability: I enjoy writing, and I must set my goals according to my skills and time restraints.
When it comes to supporting the behavior needed to meet the resolution that I approve of, have an affinity for, and the ability to accomplish what should I do next? Here’s how I reasoned it out.
My tactic will be personal email newsletters to my mailing list along with weekly social media engagement. How much time or money can I reasonably spend creating and posting content? Should it be every day? …Every week? …Every Month?
Resolving to post every day on every channel is not realistic. Since I am not regularly posting on any channel right now expecting to go from zero to 100 is a setup for failure. There’s a learning curve to posting valuable content. And I believe consistency is key. Until I get the hang of it and become more tech-savvy, or hire it out to a service, a daily social post to several platforms isn’t going to happen. Weekly posting is a slightly more realistic goal, though still aggressive without additional resources. When assessing the frequency for the email newsletter, the process was similar. I determined a monthly message is the best goal to start. And it checks the box of achievable. Twelve emails in a year.
So get started, or re-started, with those goals and resolutions. It’s not too late. And make sure to align the key behaviors supporting your resolve with the attributes of affinity, approval, and ability to help you succeed in keeping it.
Do you have a resolution success to share? How did you keep the motivation going?
