Trigger Warning: You already broke your New Year’s Resolution

“bzzzzz” “beep beep beep”

“ugh”

Snooze.

9 minutes pass.

“bzzzzz” “beep beep beep”

“errrgh”

So warm. Dream so good. Not yet.

Snooze.

9 minutes pass.

“bzzzzz” “beep beep beep”

Still time. Okay one more.

Snooze.

9 minutes pass.

“bzzzzz” “beep beep beep”

Alright. Fine.

Stop.

Instagram.

Scroll. Scroll. Scroll.

TikTok.

Scroll. Scroll. Scroll.

“bzzz” “ding”

“Your meeting starts in 10 minutes”

Roll out of bed. Make coffee.

Log on.

Still sleepy. Back to bed?

Caffeine hits.

Awake. Grumpy. Bed after meeting?

Meeting done. Hungry.

Breakfast. Leftovers. General Tso’s.

“Yum.”

Tired. More Coffee.

“What do we got today?”

“Ugh.”

More meetings. Still time.

Back to Bed.

Scroll. Scroll. Scroll.

“Oh f*ck. That’s today…”

Panic.

Almost done.

Another meeting.

“Okay that’s good enough.”

Assignment. Done.

“phew”

Lunch. Instagram. TikTok.

Coffee.

Work. Meetings. Coffee. Work. Meetings.

5pm. Close Laptop.

Gym?

Too Tired.

Dinner? No more food.

Uber Eats. Pizza.

“oooh they have chocolate cake?”

“ding”

Added to cart.

Netflix.

Pizza.

Cake.

“Yum.”

Bored.

Scroll. Scroll. Scrooo-

Food coma hits.

“zzzzz”

Awake. Barely.

“Are you still watching?”

Power off.

Bed.

Date: Thursday, February 1st, 2024.

New Years Resolution list:

wake up earlier
stop snoozing alarm
go for a morning walk
stop drinking so much caffeine
go to the gym after work
eat healthier
less social media

It’s Friday now, your friends that were doing Dry January want to go out. You get absolutely obliterated. Saturday now, let’s run it back. Why not.

drink less alcohol
save money
go for a run each weekend

It’s Sunday now. Hangover hits. Existential dread follows.

Maybe next year.

How did that make you feel? Attacked? Sad? Annoyed?

Maybe only parts seemed frustratingly familiar? But familiar nonetheless.

It’s gonna be okay. You’re not alone.

Let’s talk about why it made you feel that way.

Why do we make New Year’s Resolutions?

It’s just an arbitrary time of year to set goals, right? January 1 is just another day. But the first day of the new year carries so much more weight.

Out with the old, in with the new. It feels fresh. There’s a certain optimistic energy in the air.

It feels good to set goals for yourself at the start of the year. They give you hope that you will be a better you by next year.

Who doesn’t want that?

If you actually achieve a goal, you feel unstoppable.

You say to yourself, “Look at you, you did the damn thing. Good job.”

If you fail, you may brush it off or try to ignore it, but deep down you know it doesn’t feel too great.

According to YouGov, only 22% of Americans stuck to all of their goals in 2023. Less than 1/3. And only 54% stuck to some of their goals. Just over half. (keep in mind this is self-reported data, they did not actually track each goal from each person over the course of the year) ¹

Why do so many people fail at their goals every year?

A lot of people make goals that are reasonably attainable - highly likely to succeed.
Others, fairly hopeful - medium likely to succeed, but they require a large effort.
And for some, outright impossible - not likely to succeed, almost certainly never going to happen.

So many people struggle to hit their yearly goals because a year is such an elusive amount of time.

It’s just long enough that you feel like you have the time to accomplish so many things, yet so few people achieve everything they set out to each year.

“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten.”

— Bill Gates

Our greatest goals in life almost always span more than just one year.

However, each new year, we set the expectation that we’re going to drastically change our lives.

You start off great, then a couple weeks pass, then months. Before you know it, it’s November and you’re looking at the next year right around the corner.

Maybe you stuck with most of your goals, but some get put on the backburner. Other things in life come up. You take your eye off the ball. And those goals you had are forgotten.

When it comes to goal setting, New Year’s Resolutions definitely steal the show.

But we’re constantly setting mini goals for ourselves each day.

I’m talking about the small tasks like cleaning your room, doing laundry, setting up a dentist appointment, going to the grocery store, etc.

I’m sure there have been days when you’ve put off one or a few of these to-do’s. We’ve all been there.

If you don’t do them today, you’ll survive. You could probably even get away with skipping them tomorrow, too.

But a day turns into a week. A week to a month…you get the point.

No matter how big or small the goal is, failing to achieve your goals sucks.

It feels bad and stresses you out.

Why does it feel so bad?

Let’s get down to the root of the problem.

What is a goal?

At its core, a goal is a promise and a deadline.

A promise to yourself to do some thing before a specific date and time.

“I’m going to do: X by this date/time: Y”, you tell yourself.

Promise. Deadline.

Ahhhhhh. We’re onto something here.

When you fail to hit a goal, you’re breaking a promise with yourself.

It feels bad because promises are inherently really personal.

Why?

Promises are an agreement of trust.

Let me put it this way, if someone broke a promise with you, would you trust them?

Here’s a scenario for you…

You need to clean your house before a party you’re throwing, but you don’t have the time to do it yourself. So you hire a cleaning service to do it.

They don’t show up.

Would you hire them again?

Of course not. You don’t trust them.

Those mini to-do’s you put off ‘til tomorrow, they add up.

You may ignore them. But your subconscious mind is in the background keeping score.

Each time you set out to do something, but then say, “nah, I’ll just do it tomorrow”, your mind is taking that and sticking it in the filing cabinet it under “I can’t trust this person.”

Who’s going to trust you if you can’t trust yourself?

In my own experience, I’ve done this quite a bit. And eventually, I noticed something was happening as a result, which made me rethink everything.

Whenever I started to put off a lot of these small tasks until the next day, I felt the lack of trust in myself started to trickle into other areas of my life, and ultimately, prevent me from pursuing the larger goals I’d set for myself.

Breaking a promise with yourself is like dropping a small pebble into a pond. It’s so tiny and forgotten about as it sinks to the bottom of the pond, yet it creates ripples on the surface that expand throughout the entire system.

The filing cabinet slowly fills up.

When one promise is broken, another follows, and soon we find ourselves in a cycle.

This cycle is “autocatalytic”, in other words its self-causing. The process feeds itself. ²

If you find yourself in this cycle, like I have and many others have, you need a way to break free from it.

So how do you begin trusting yourself again?

You need evidence.

You need to become a person who can be trusted again.

Sounds easier than it is.

From the start of your day until you go to sleep, each action you take influences the next.

If you start your day by snoozing your alarm, you’ve already broken one promise to yourself. Maybe you stayed up too late the night before mindlessly scrolling in bed. Whatever it was, there was a cause to you hitting snooze. And hitting snooze will be the cause to more poor “decisions” throughout the day.

I say “decisions” because we don’t actively think about a lot of the things we do. You might think you’re always acting freely, but the decisions you make each day are often decided on autopilot.

We’ve developed our autopilot to automate our lives for our own benefit. It allows us to learn and act without thinking.

Our brains are pattern recognition machines.

We’re able to learn at rapid rate. Think back to last week’s piece: Learn or Die: 8 Tips to Learn Anything Fast

It’s how we’ve survived.

So why do we form bad habits when we know that they’re not helping us achieve our goals?

Habits: the good, the bad, the sneaky

I used to think creating good habits was simple.

I figured out that your habits add up, whether they are good or bad. More good habits, more success. More bad habits, less success.

At the surface, it is that simple.

I’d heard about Atomic Habits by James Clear a bunch of times, but I always thought, “how could someone write a book on a topic as simple as habits?”

Well…after reading this book, I can tell you, there’s a lot more to it. It’s not that simple when realize what habits are actually are.

The word “habit” is essentially the marketing term for human behavior.

Habit - simple, small, easy to understand.
Human Behavior - complex, vast, difficult to understand.

In this section, I’m going to give you my sparknotes on this book and how the lessons I learned relate to self-trust.

Let’s go back to the original question:

Why do so many people fail at their goals every year?

1) Identity > Outcome

Goals are not just the results we wish to see. They are who we want to become.

Clear suggests that we often look at this backwards. We obsess over the outcomes. But actually, we should be looking at who we want to become first, and the outcomes will follow. Identity over outcome.

Outcomes - what you get
Processes - what you do
Identity - what you believe

Three Layer of Behavior Change: Outcomes, Processes, Identity

A few examples to think through using this model:

I want to get in shape —> I’m fit.
I want to read more books —> I’m a reader.
I want to quit smoking —> I’m not a smoker.

Important: The direction of change matters.

Outcome-Based Habits vs. Identity-Based Habits

First, focus on your Identity - who do you want to become?

Then the Process - how does someone become that type of person?

Last, the Outcome - what will becoming that type of person result in? ³

For example,

Identity: I want to become a fit person.
Process: A fit person is disciplined. They a set routine and they stick to it no matter what else happens.
Outcome: A fit person feels good in their own body, is able to move freely, is strong, has a resilient mind, and is more attractive.

2) Systems > Goals

Goals are the desired end result, but we rarely have a system to get there.

“You do not rise to the level of you goals. You fail to the level of your systems.” ⁴

How do you expect to get in shape if you have no set plan?

You’re just hoping that you’ll be motivated to go to the gym each day.

That’s like trying to sail across ocean with no map. You’re bound to get lost no matter how much you hope you’ll get there.

Replace that hope with a system.

Get a workout plan. Get a nutrition plan. Set a schedule. Stick to it.

3) Identify Bad Habits

We often know a habit is bad for us but we do it anyway. And they add up if you’re not careful.

Bad habits repeat because they actually do serve us, but not in the way you’d like them to.

They reward us with some form of comfort.

Skip the gym —> you get to relax and watch TV
Get fast food —> you don’t have to cook anything and you feel full from the calorie dense food

Our desire to get the repeated comfort is what makes bad habits so hard to resist.

For this reason, identifying our bad habits is key.

One philosophy I live by is, “if you track it, it will improve.” You need awareness first, then you can act accordingly.

To quote one of my high school Literature teachers, “You don’t know what you don’t know you don’t know.” (thanks Doc)

Bottom line: acknowledge your bad habits.

James Clear uses what he calls “The Habits Scorecard.”

This is something I’d done prior to reading the book and have found it to be extremely helpful (tbh I probably picked it up from someone who had already read the book).

Here’s what you need to do:

Write down a list of every single action you took so far today. Continue it throughout the day. Then, before you go to bed tonight, go down the list and put a “+”, “-”, or “=” next to each activity.

“+” for good habits.
“-” for bad habits.
“=” for neutral habits.

Make sure you are basing each habit type on the person you want to become, not the comfort that the habit provides.

e.g. McDonald’s sausage egg and cheese mcgriddle, a bacon egg and cheese biscuit with a 2 hashbrowns is not a positive if you’re trying to become someone who’s fit, despite it being oh so delicious.

(did that make you want some MacDo’s? It did for me while writing this.)

That was a cue. Words on this page to straight to your dome, down to your tastebuds, and then to your stomach.

Cues are so sneaky. They’re everywhere.

With this list, you now have a blueprint for which habits you need to keep and which ones you need get rid of.

How to get replace Bad Habits with Good Habits?

Habit formation is a 4 step process:

Cue —> Craving —> Response —> Reward

Each one leads to the next without you even thinking about it.

Your subconscious mind is dumb smart.

And by that I mean it’s so smart that it’s dumb. Like that kid in class who would never study, still ace every test, but had no common sense.

Your subconscious knows how to take a cue and get to the reward, but when it comes to sifting through which cues are actually good or bad for you, it’s easily led astray.

Clear breaks down how to set yourself up for success in what he calls “The 4 Laws of Behavior Change.” Each law directly addresses each step in the habit formation process.

He goes into great depth on each law and its inversion, including studies proving why each one is important and how they work in practice.

Relating back to setting goals and keeping promises to ourselves, I found these points most helpful:

Implementation Intention - choose a specific time and place to take action. ⁶
- Promise —> Deadline
Habit Stacking - pair new good habits with an existing good habits. ⁷
- The existing good habit will become the cue for the new one.
- Create good habit cycles, not bad ones.
Control Your Environment - our external environment affects how we act ⁸
- We’re often living in spaces created by someone else.
- Take back control and make it so that your environment promotes the good habits you’re looking to form.

These are just a few relating to the 1st Law on cues.

When it comes to trusting yourself, and doing the things you know have to do, this is the most important step. Using this knowledge, you’ll be able to break free from the clutches of your own autopilot and start to align your habits with who you want to become. You’re aware now.

You understand the importance of honoring your relationship with yourself.

It is the greatest form of self-love.

If you can’t trust yourself, no one will.

Daily actions, no matter how small, can compound to great change.

Think about the person you want to become. Create a process to become that person. And correct anything stopping you from becoming that person.

Future you will thank you.

-Ryan Ward

(If you’ve made it this far, I highly recommend reading Atomic Habits yourself because of the sheer depth that James Clear goes into. He has a great story starting with a life-threatening injury, which he overcame and used what he learned to become an ESPN Academic All American at Denison University for baseball, and eventually a best-selling author with this book. He breaks down each facet of habit formation in an easy to follow framework on how to build good habits and break bad ones.)

Footnotes

¹ https://today.yougov.com/society/articles/45203-americans-are-sticking-new-years-resolutions

² Atomic Habits by James Clear. Page 93.

³ Atomic Habits by James Clear. Pages 30-31.

⁴ Atomic Habits by James Clear. Page 27.

⁵ Atomic Habits by James Clear. Page 54.

⁶ Atomic Habits by James Clear. Page 70.

⁷ Atomic Habits by James Clear. Page 74.

⁸ Atomic Habits by James Clear. Page 84.