Are you finally going to get healthy, fit, lose weight, quit smoking,start cooking, cut out the sugar?

There is something about the start of a new year that makes us think we can make the changes we want or need; it’s the sense of a clean slate, the promise of a whole year where we can do things differently if we choose to. Often despite the fact that we did something similar last year, with the results perhaps not as impressive as we had hoped So, if you want to make New Year resolutions this year, or perhaps specifically decided not to because of your experiences in previous years,this article is for you!

80% of New Year’s resolutions are abandoned by February! I don’t want you to become part of this statistic, so I’m going to give you 4 reasons why your New Year’s resolutions have failed in the past, and give you a few tips to help you stick with them long enough to make a real change and be in the 20% of successful New Year’s Resolutions.

1. The problem with then and now

When you set your New Year’s resolutions, your focus is on the longer term future. If you decided to quit smoking or getting fit, you’ll be imagining running up the stairs without any trouble; cook healthy food everyday; say No to sugar snacks and/or soft drinks..

You imagined the end-state of your resolution. In that beautiful end image, there is no room for the many annoying, difficult, frustrating actions you must take each hour/day/week to get to that end state.We don’t abandon our resolutions because we change our mind about the importance of the end state; we abandon them because we struggle with the journey to get there.

2. You may want to change, but your environment hasn’t

We often don’t realise how much our behaviours are embedded in, and enabled by, our environment. There are triggers in our environment that set off a string of behaviours, often without us realising it. I’ve heard many people who tried to quit smoking complain that the hardest time was at a certain event during the day: first morning coffee; that moment just after dinner. Or you may have decided to stop snacking on biscuits, chocolate or other not so healthy foods at night, but you bought them so you know they are in the cupboard…. I’m not suggesting you blame your environment for not being able to make important behavioural changes! But if you don’t know how our old behaviours are cemented in our environment, you will not succeed in making the changes.

3. What you feel stands in the way of what you think

We are emotional beasts. No matter how much you might like to think you are a rational being, your brain disagrees. To grossly simplify this: our emotional areas in the brain are activated much faster than our rational areas, and as a result we usually ‘decide’ to act based how we feel about a situation than what we think about it. A simple example to illustrate:if you’ve decided to go for an early morning run a few days a week to get fit,and you find you’re hitting the snooze button when the alarm goes off and coming up with very rational sounding arguments why tomorrow would be a much better day to start your running, your actions have been dictated by your emotions!

4. You don’t have the right strategies

As a successful, effective, well-adjusted adult, we are supposed to know how to do things. That’s what we tell ourselves. And you have evidence! There will be many changes you have made successfully in your life; there are many things you are good at that you know others are not. So when you decide to change your behaviour in some new way, you assume you know how to go about it and have the necessary strategies to be successful. But you may not be aware of exactly what strategies you have used in the past and why they worked.Or you may have some excellent strategies for some parts of the process (you’re a great starter of things) but not all of the process (not so good at finishing perhaps?). Or the strategies that you have work for some type of behaviour changes but not for others.

So there you have it: 4 reasons why your very important and worthwhile New Year’s resolutions may have already been abandoned or could be sometime soon. But they don’t have to be! Here are 2 powerful strategies to stop those 4 reasons from derailing you.

1. Start with your environment.

Often it is easier to change your environment so your old behaviour isn’t triggered than it is to fight the triggers. So start by taking a close look at what triggers there may be in your environment that you could change or eliminate. I worked with someone who wanted to start swimming in the evening. Her routine was to get home from work, change into something more comfortable (pyjamas!), and then cook and eat dinner. She was very frustrated that she wasn’t able to motivate herself to then change out of her PJs and in the swimmers and go to the pool! Talk about a powerful trigger not to go. So we worked out a different routine: when she got home she would change into swimmers, then cook and eat dinner. Getting to the pool was a lot easier after that.

2. Small steps, one step at a time.

The end-state image of what your change will result in is absolutely crucial to make the decision to start. But after that, that image is only going to make you feel overwhelmed. It’s always seems so far away, so out of reach. Instead, when you’ve decided on you change, start by asking yourself questions:

• On a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being nowhere near the goal, and 10 being fully achieved the goal, where are you at the moment?
• What small actions can you undertake to get yourself to the next number?

Then all you do is focus on those small actions. Small actions usually provoke less strong emotions and are much easier to turn into habits.

Let me work through a scenario for you on this one. Let’s say you want to start making your own healthy lunch each day, and you feel you are at a 3 on the scale at the moment. So how to get to a 4? Perhaps a small action can be to take 10 minutes each Sunday evening to plan what you’re going to have for lunch for the week. Or a small action can be to make a couple of lunches on the weekend and keep them in the fridge ready to take with you.

And when you think you’ve progressed to the next number on the scale, you think about what small actions you can take to get to the next number, and so on.

New Year’s resolutions can work! Make sure you are one of the 20% of people who make them work.