Happy New Year! Now, can we PLEASE address the elephant in the room? Blog #4
Jan 18, 2023 by Amy Elizabeth Matuza
“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.” - Thomas Edison.
Ah, yes! The company is gone. The decorations have been packed up in boxes and carried up to the attic to sit for the next eleven months. The Christmas tree is lying on top of our firepit in the woods awaiting a family bonfire night. The house is clean and looks a bit bare without all of the holiday trappings. The kids are all back at school. This can only mean one thing...it is January.
I love January! (Aside from the fact that in New England it gets dark around 4:30pm at this time of year.) For me, it is the month where I recover from the prior two. Since we have usually seen tons of friends and family during the holidays, it is a pressure free month to hibernate, not fill up my calendar with social plans, slow down, enjoy my quiet house, and set some goals and intentions for the upcoming year. It is this last thing that can cause me both such joy and such frustration – and I am not alone.
According to my very extensive and highly-trustworthy googling activity earlier this morning, somewhere around 40% of American adults make a New Year’s resolution. Of this group, only about 10% of them (give or take) actually keep them. So, out of almost 332 million Americans, only slightly north of 13 million actually keep a resolution each year. (The elephant in the room.) I find this an interesting bit of information, but not totally surprising.
Making a New Year’s resolution should be no different than any other dream or goal that we have for our lives. Our odds of achieving any desired objective – personally, at work, financially, or with respect to our health, to name a few – are based on the work that we do to attain it. Without a plan, a goal will always remain just that - a goal. I think that so many New Year’s resolutions fail to become reality because they lack an actionable plan for success.
In my book, “Food for Thought: Twenty-Minute Life Recipes from Mom”, I focus on this concept in Chapter 2 – To Succeed you Must Dream, Plan, Prepare and (Maybe) Pivot. It takes a focus on all four of these components to successfully achieve our goals. If we do, we will develop healthy habits that are key to realizing our dreams including breaking down our actions into smaller ones to make them more reachable; allowing for obstacles to slow us down but not stop us; and changing directions when we need to.
When it comes to New Year’s resolutions, it seems like we do a lot of focusing on the “Dream” and then fall flat with the other three components. I have learned this the hard way over many years of failed resolutions because I neglected to focus on a solid process to fulfill them. Here are a few examples where I crashed and burned for one reason or another. (Honestly, some were just sheer stupidity and youth!)
There was the year that I was going to lose ten pounds by the end of January because I had eaten my way through a semester abroad in Europe and no longer fit into my winter clothes. The dream was there. The plan was not. First of all, losing ten pounds in a month basically constitutes starving yourself and that was just not going to work for me. After about 4 days, I was ravenous, agitated and I could not study because I had no energy. Aside from this, my plan to go to the gym 5 days a week was stymied by sub-zero temperatures and a blizzard which made it nearly impossible (and really undesirable) to walk a mile across campus to the athletic complex to work out.
One year, I decided to talk less. For those of you who know me, I would kindly ask that you stop laughing. It was a good goal for me, but I never bothered to outline how I was going to do that. Would I put a limit on the amount of time that I would speak every day? Would I not participate in conversations more than X many times to provide my opinion? Would I not answer questions when people asked me something? With very little planning or preparation, my dream to be quieter was squashed in short order. I truly don’t even think that I lasted a day and a half with that one.
My silliest resolution and biggest epic fail came after a particularly raucous New Year’s Eve party where I liberally partook of the libations provided and vowed to not drink for an entire year after waking up feeling like death warmed over (as my mother used to say). In order to address my hangover on New Year’s morning (I didn’t even make it hours into the new year), I was persuaded to take “the hair of the dog” approach to feeling better and promptly imbibed to lessen my terrible headache. In my defense, I was only about a quarter serious about my resolution, and giving up alcohol during my senior year in college would have been a tall order. I’m noticing a theme with my college years’ resolutions – they were pretty ridiculous...
Thankfully, over the years, I have become more focused on making sure that my resolutions were actually achievable and actionable. One year I decided to do one nice thing for someone else every day and to keep myself honest, I actually put the action in my daily planner. Several years ago, I resolved to give up drinking for the 46 days of Lent (I am not Catholic but it seemed like a good idea health-wise.) After several successful years of doing this, I moved the 46-day period to begin on January 1st and now do a “Dry January” plus the remaining 15 days of the length of Lent. I surely am not capable of never drinking again, but I am capable of making a commitment to do it for a month and a half. (Dmitry still asks me why?) Again, it is not about the resolution. It is just about setting yourself up to succeed in achieving it.
The best thing about resolutions is that you can always make new ones, or modify existing ones, or ditch ones that are not working! So, if you may have already fallen short of your New Year’s resolution – make a new one and start planning, preparing and (perhaps) pivoting in order to achieve it. Don’t give up! Try again, and again, and again, and eventually you will get to your goal. You may need to change course, or ask for help, or bite off smaller chunks of work at times, or put your dream on hold for a bit. You may need to give yourself some grace when the going gets tough. But, the beautiful thing is that if you plan and prepare to live into your dreams, you are already halfway there. Just keep moving forward!
Ah, yes! The company is gone. The decorations have been packed up in boxes and carried up to the attic to sit for the next eleven months. The Christmas tree is lying on top of our firepit in the woods awaiting a family bonfire night. The house is clean and looks a bit bare without all of the holiday trappings. The kids are all back at school. This can only mean one thing...it is January.
I love January! (Aside from the fact that in New England it gets dark around 4:30pm at this time of year.) For me, it is the month where I recover from the prior two. Since we have usually seen tons of friends and family during the holidays, it is a pressure free month to hibernate, not fill up my calendar with social plans, slow down, enjoy my quiet house, and set some goals and intentions for the upcoming year. It is this last thing that can cause me both such joy and such frustration – and I am not alone.
According to my very extensive and highly-trustworthy googling activity earlier this morning, somewhere around 40% of American adults make a New Year’s resolution. Of this group, only about 10% of them (give or take) actually keep them. So, out of almost 332 million Americans, only slightly north of 13 million actually keep a resolution each year. (The elephant in the room.) I find this an interesting bit of information, but not totally surprising.
Making a New Year’s resolution should be no different than any other dream or goal that we have for our lives. Our odds of achieving any desired objective – personally, at work, financially, or with respect to our health, to name a few – are based on the work that we do to attain it. Without a plan, a goal will always remain just that - a goal. I think that so many New Year’s resolutions fail to become reality because they lack an actionable plan for success.
In my book, “Food for Thought: Twenty-Minute Life Recipes from Mom”, I focus on this concept in Chapter 2 – To Succeed you Must Dream, Plan, Prepare and (Maybe) Pivot. It takes a focus on all four of these components to successfully achieve our goals. If we do, we will develop healthy habits that are key to realizing our dreams including breaking down our actions into smaller ones to make them more reachable; allowing for obstacles to slow us down but not stop us; and changing directions when we need to.
When it comes to New Year’s resolutions, it seems like we do a lot of focusing on the “Dream” and then fall flat with the other three components. I have learned this the hard way over many years of failed resolutions because I neglected to focus on a solid process to fulfill them. Here are a few examples where I crashed and burned for one reason or another. (Honestly, some were just sheer stupidity and youth!)
There was the year that I was going to lose ten pounds by the end of January because I had eaten my way through a semester abroad in Europe and no longer fit into my winter clothes. The dream was there. The plan was not. First of all, losing ten pounds in a month basically constitutes starving yourself and that was just not going to work for me. After about 4 days, I was ravenous, agitated and I could not study because I had no energy. Aside from this, my plan to go to the gym 5 days a week was stymied by sub-zero temperatures and a blizzard which made it nearly impossible (and really undesirable) to walk a mile across campus to the athletic complex to work out.
One year, I decided to talk less. For those of you who know me, I would kindly ask that you stop laughing. It was a good goal for me, but I never bothered to outline how I was going to do that. Would I put a limit on the amount of time that I would speak every day? Would I not participate in conversations more than X many times to provide my opinion? Would I not answer questions when people asked me something? With very little planning or preparation, my dream to be quieter was squashed in short order. I truly don’t even think that I lasted a day and a half with that one.
My silliest resolution and biggest epic fail came after a particularly raucous New Year’s Eve party where I liberally partook of the libations provided and vowed to not drink for an entire year after waking up feeling like death warmed over (as my mother used to say). In order to address my hangover on New Year’s morning (I didn’t even make it hours into the new year), I was persuaded to take “the hair of the dog” approach to feeling better and promptly imbibed to lessen my terrible headache. In my defense, I was only about a quarter serious about my resolution, and giving up alcohol during my senior year in college would have been a tall order. I’m noticing a theme with my college years’ resolutions – they were pretty ridiculous...
Thankfully, over the years, I have become more focused on making sure that my resolutions were actually achievable and actionable. One year I decided to do one nice thing for someone else every day and to keep myself honest, I actually put the action in my daily planner. Several years ago, I resolved to give up drinking for the 46 days of Lent (I am not Catholic but it seemed like a good idea health-wise.) After several successful years of doing this, I moved the 46-day period to begin on January 1st and now do a “Dry January” plus the remaining 15 days of the length of Lent. I surely am not capable of never drinking again, but I am capable of making a commitment to do it for a month and a half. (Dmitry still asks me why?) Again, it is not about the resolution. It is just about setting yourself up to succeed in achieving it.
The best thing about resolutions is that you can always make new ones, or modify existing ones, or ditch ones that are not working! So, if you may have already fallen short of your New Year’s resolution – make a new one and start planning, preparing and (perhaps) pivoting in order to achieve it. Don’t give up! Try again, and again, and again, and eventually you will get to your goal. You may need to change course, or ask for help, or bite off smaller chunks of work at times, or put your dream on hold for a bit. You may need to give yourself some grace when the going gets tough. But, the beautiful thing is that if you plan and prepare to live into your dreams, you are already halfway there. Just keep moving forward!
