By: Ryan P. Dolan
“My New Year’s resolution? I will be less laz…”
Jim Gaffigan
It’s late January.
Your New Year’s resolutions, which you set with such expectation and hope, are starting to fall by the wayside, as your willpower and motivation start to crack. Think about this time last year. You came to the end of 2018, with a gnawing sense that you weren’t living up to your potential in many different areas. 2019 WOULD be different, you told yourself. 2019 WOULD be the year of sustainable growth and change. You started the year on a mission to eat healthier and lose weight, start going to the gym, learn Spanish, get promoted and achieve a certain income goal from work, spend less and save more, spend more quality time with your kids, watch less Netflix, etc., etc. As 2019 rolled on, like clockwork, the motivation ebbs, the old comfortable habits reassert themselves, and one by one, your resolutions were ditched. This cycle leaves you feeling increasingly deflated at your lack of willpower and discipline, your capacity to change and grow. For many, this inability to make progress throughout the year culminates in the holiday season binge, when all remaining discipline is thrown out the window. In the last few days of the year you vow to yourself that next year will be different. And the self-delusionary cycle begins again.
It seems the more excessive a person’s behavior in the prior year, the less anchored their behavior to their larger values and vision, the more fervor they bring to resolutions. They have an almost puritanical urge to punish themselves and atone for their behavior. And so here you are, in late January doing Keto, you joined a gym, you’re not drinking, and resolving to cut spending to monk-like levels. No more lattes at Starbucks, no clothes shopping, and no eating out. You’ve started a meditation practice. Deep down underneath all that superficial hope and positive thinking, you know this won’t work sustainably. And once again you’ll join the purported 80% of people who give up on their resolutions by February.
I believe New Year’s resolutions persist and are so universally popular, despite their record of futility, because the core idea behind them is a sound one. It is good to reflect on the year gone by and to plan for the year ahead. The problem is the way people approach, set and implement resolutions. I think many people approach resolutions primarily as a reaction to negative behaviors they don’t like. They’ve put on weight, they’re not saving enough, they aren’t making as much money as they want. They look at a negative outcome, and set resolutions to counter that trend. The problem is they haven’t identified the true “why” behind what they are trying to achieve. They are so focused on what they don’t want, that they haven’t identified and defined what they do.
When we don’t have a clear, candid, and objective understanding of who we really are, where we’ve come from, our strengths and weaknesses, and our most important values, we can’t build a roadmap for where we want to go. When you don’t start to concretely define your “why” you end up living in a way that doesn’t align with that vision. Deep down we all have that quiet, persistent internal voice which lets us know if we are living in a manner congruent with our “why.” When we are not, it results in creeping frustration and anxiety. It is an all too human reaction to want to drown out those feelings with short-term dopamine hits: buying a new car, taking a vacation, eating bad food, becoming addicted to social media and distraction. As we all know, these hits are ethereal, and wear off all too quickly. In the end our actions leave us more deflated than before.
Rather than making resolutions based on a strategic vision, most would rather focus on tactics. They focus on too many areas, make resolutions that are too vague, too lofty, or too short-term. With the exception of maybe losing weight, money is likely the most popular subject for resolutions. For those looking to create transformational financial change and growth, I recommend that step one should be ditching resolutions. At best they don’t work, and at worst, they can be counterproductive. Deep down, you know real growth can’t come from a short-term “hack” that promises much gain and little pain. The process to get there takes time, but when done right, sustainable progress can start to build fairly quickly. The hardest part is the beginning.
When I start working with clients, tactics are the last thing on my mind, which is unusual in a tactics-obsessed business. The focus, rather, is on trying to build an understanding of the clients’ “why.” Typically, when I ask clients what they are hoping to achieve in their life, both personally and financially, most throw out a handful of common, standard answers: to save more money, put the kids through college, save for retirement. Over time, and through a lot of questioning and listening, we begin to unearth a host of deeper priorities and goals that are much more personalized and deeply held by the clients. Initially, these revelations can come as a surprise to clients, but over time they realize how these newly discovered goals are deeply authentic. When I do my job well, over time, clients begin to understand their own core motivations and mission to a degree they didn’t realize, both in themselves or their spouses.
From this solid foundation of mission, we can start to build strategy and tactics to achieve them. It is much easier to improve near-term behaviors if the client understands the larger context behind them. Just telling someone to save more is useless. Having them define a core long-term goal, building a series of steps needed to get there, and holding them accountable to that goal has a much higher chance of success. Changing ingrained behaviors takes time, and it helps to keep areas of focus limited and achievable. But when near-term goals are hit, momentum builds, and confidence and tranquility increase.
When this process continues proactively throughout the year, the year-end ritual is one you can expect to look forward to. Your behavior in the past year will be more consistent and more disciplined, and you will have confidence in your ability to make further progress and growth in the year ahead.