By Bill Quain
It’s that time of year again! In a few days, we’ll be shouting “Happy New Year,” and getting a great start to 2024. In Ocean City, we have the famous “First Night” celebration. It’s time to “ring out the old and ring in the new.” The ball will drop on Times Square. If you look closely, you’ll see the spirit of Dick Clark on your television set.
And, all that is fine, but…
Each year, millions of people make the infamous New Year’s resolutions. Each year, almost as many people break those resolutions – sometimes within hours of the Jan. 1 sunrise.
How many? Well, rather than guess, I simply went to Google and asked! Here is what the “featured snippet” (from the Ohio State University), had to say, at the top of page 1:
“Researchers suggest that only 9% of Americans who make resolutions complete them. In fact, research goes on to say that 23% of people who make resolutions quit them in the first week! And 43% quit by the end of January.”
The featured snippet lists four tips to avoid bad results for your resolutions:
- Goals should start at the time of change.
Or, start with the need for change (not just because it is tradition).
- Expect obstacles.
There are always going to be obstacles, so have a plan!
- Set goals into smaller, measurable chunks.
Don’t set the finish line too far from the starting line.
- Get accountability.
Set goals and make them public.
The big problem with traditional resolutions
I have to agree with Ohio State on all four aspects. When resolutions fail, it’s often because they do not have accountability, the right start time, the right planning, or measurable goals.
However, none of them are really the big problem. The big problem is that almost all New Year’s resolutions are positive, forward-looking propositions, and most people are just not positive, forward-looking thinkers!
Looking into the future isn’t easy. However, looking into the past is a piece of cake! Anyone can look into the past. After all, you were there when it happened, right? If you are looking into the future, who knows where you will be, or what you will be facing.
Let’s take a very easy and simple example. You make a New Year’s resolution to lose weight. I believe that this is the most popular resolution, and so, it is the one that is broken the most often. It’s easy to say that you will lose weight. It’s hard to do it! Even on New Year’s Day, someone might say, “I have this cake left over from last night’s party. Who can help me eat it?”
It is very difficult to predict how you will react to certain stimuli, especially if you made that same resolution each year, for the last twenty years! The future is easy to promise, but devilishly difficult to encounter!
Forget the positive. Remember the negative.
Here is a fantastic bit of advice for making and keeping resolutions. Forget the future because you can never “remember the future.” It hasn’t happened yet. If you are predicting that you will somehow change your behavior, in response to a stimulus you don’t even know about, you’ll fail.
The “positive” action you desire is in the future. You have no experience with positive behavior in certain areas. That’s why you are failing.
Instead of trying to predict your future behavior, concentrate on remembering how bad you felt in the past when you were acting with negative impulses to create negative results. It’s no problem to remember the impact of negative behavior in the past because it actually happened. You know what you did, and you know what the negative consequences were. You don’t need to rely on fuzzy predictions that will evaporate the minute you are placed into challenging circumstances.
Forget “go ahead and get started”.
That’s right. Forget “go ahead and get started.” Don’t start a new habit this year. Instead, concentrate on “go ahead and stop.” That means stop your bad habit before adding a new one. It is so much easier!
You need a New Year’s resolution because you have done things that put you in a bad spot. So instead of starting something new, you need to stop the bad habits that put you in a difficult situation.
If you keep starting new things without examining why your old habits failed, you are bound to fail. Who wants to fail? Nobody. You’ve been failing every year, so don’t add to the problem by doing it again.
It’s easier to stop doing things.
When you make a last year’s resolution, you aren’t looking ahead. You are just looking back and seeing where you went wrong before, which is much easier to do than predicting positive behavior.
To give you a few examples of last year’s resolutions, I put together this list of 12 things to S-T-O-P. Take a look at them. Each of them is a six-word resolution, in response to a six-word prompt. The six-word prompt is: “2023 was the last year I’ll…”
Here are the sample resolutions:
- Be stuck because I need money
- Hit the “snooze button” three times
- Set the finish line far away
- Worry about things I can’t change
- Stare at pants I can’t wear
- Wonder where a whole day went
- Throw out food I never cooked
- Pay monthly fees I don’t use
- Fill my house with useless clutter
- Keep my true value to myself
- Be a bad example to others
- Forget who my real friends are!
You have personal experience with each of the 12 resolutions above. These are real, in-your-life experiences. If you make these your resolutions, you’ll at least know what you are dealing with, because you’ve already done them!
OK, make your last year’s resolutions.
You can do it! You have the prompt, twelve examples, and an open invitation to share your resolutions with me and with the readers of this column. Shoot me an email at bill@quain.com. We’ll compile those resolutions in a nice list for a future column. In the meantime, Happy Last Year. As always, I’ll see ‘ya in the papers.
Bill is a Professor in Stockton University’s Hospitality Management Program. He is the author of 27 books, and a highly-respected speaker. Even though he is almost totally blind, Bill is a long-distance runner and runs the Ocean City Half Marathon each year. He lives in Ocean City with his wife Jeanne, and his Guide Dog Trudy. Visit www.billquain.com or email him at bill@quain.com.
