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New Year's Resolution #1: No More Resolutions!

Here's an article I wrote a year ago and am recycling. I'll be posting a followup to it later this week where we'll follow someone who is trying to implement a Kaizan Approach to change in his life this year. We'll see how it works!

If you have ever poured your mind, body and soul into creating and implementing New Year's resolutions, chances are good you won't be doing that again soon. New Year's resolutions are more notorious for producing frustration than personal growth; because of this, many therapists suggest alternate methods for moving to higher ground.

"My advice regarding New Year's resolutions," says Judith Brodie, a Denver, Colorado based therapist, and a parent coach, "is to not make them!" In her work at Vive!, Inc., a Boulder, Colorado-based company that helps families struggling with a troubled teen, Brodie has worked with countless parents who were desperate to make changes, but exasperated by failed attempts.

Despite Brodie's dismissive approach toward resolutions, she is a champion of process-oriented personal growth. "I'm a proponent of process," says Brodie, "of figuring out what we're ready for, what we want, what we need, and then taking small steady steps in that direction. Jumps, dives, and resolutions, in my experience, are hard for people to sustain."

Psychologist Robert Maurer, a professor in UCLA's Family Medicine Department, agrees with Brodie. "The average American makes the same New Year's resolution seven years in row before giving up," he says, "this is hardly a practical solution to us wanting to better our lives." In his new book, One Small Step Can Change Your Life, Maurer applies the Japanese corporate philosophy of Kaizen--or continuous improvement through micro changes--to therapeutic healing. Instead of creating frustration and failure by attempting immediate large-scale change, Maurer suggests easing into change. "My suggestion is to take an area of life you'd like to improve and identify an activity in that area you'd like to be doing. Engage in this activity for just one minute a day, four, five or six days per week to start."

In One Small Step Can Change Your Life, Maurer tells the story of a patient who had failed repeatedly at her attempts to stick with an exercise program. Her resistance to exercise was so great that he had her just stand on her treadmill for a minute a day where she would drink her first cup of coffee and read the paper. Before long, Maurer reports, standing led to walking a little and walking a little led to walking more and more. Small steps, Maurer contends, circumnavigate our natural, neurologically based resistance to radical change, clearing the path for a process of incremental, often life changing, improvement.

"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step," Maurer reminds us, "and research suggests that those steps need to be as small as possible to make the giant leaps we all want in our lives."

Drew Krafcik, a therapist for Vive! Inc., suggests that there is some preliminary work to be done before we even select these areas of incremental change. "Understanding why we choose to make a New Year's resolution is much more important than the resolution itself. If we don't fully understand why we've started something, how could we expect to understand why we might quit?" Krafcik suggests starting with a broad view of what we want to change in our lives and becoming clear about our motives, visions, and fears before engaging in the change process.

So this New Year, it might be good to stick to one resolution: "no resolutions!" Instead, come up with a New Year's vision--a broad-stroke image of what you want your life to look like over the next few years. Revisit this vision frequently or post it in a highly visible location, like over your desk, and use it as a rubric to evaluate all the small, even miniscule, decisions you make on a daily and weekly basis. Constantly ask, "is this small decision leading me toward, or away from, my vision of who I want to become?" You can also focus in on one or two specific activities that support this personal vision and fold one minute's worth of that activity into your schedule several days each week. This one minute might be the start of your own thousand mile journey as one minute becomes two minutes, then three minutes, then thirty minutes over time.

This "Kaizen" approach to change combines the benefits of small, manageable steps with the benefits of accumulated effect. By committing to small but continuous change this year, you may be able to achieve a great deal while avoiding the dicey, often discouraging, routine of New Year's resolutions.

Posted by Will Laughlin on December 31, 2007 2:06 PM | Permalink

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I love this article. It reminds me of an article in ADDitude Magazine about making resolutions for people with ADD/ADHD. The first best advice is not to make them. Instead create a New Year's Vision like Will suggests. My suggestions : Focus less on what you want to achieve and more on the kind of person you want to be. While it is good to make long term goals, 6 months is about as far out as one can realistically plan. Go Big: focus only on goals that that you will work towards every day and take it step by step.

Posted by Bruce MacMillan | January 11, 2008 5:22 PM

Posted on January 11, 2008 17:22