Practice your resolutions

Don't wait until January 1st

I love self-improvement in general, which means I’m fascinated by the concept of New Year’s resolutions. The traditional and perhaps jaded thinking is that most of them fail, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the concept. I just think most people do it wrong!

There is a lot of delusional thinking out there. Sometimes people set goals that they don’t actually want to do. Sometimes people haven’t thought through the constituent steps of their goals, and the logistics required to fit those steps into their lives. And sometimes we believe that we will become entirely different people on January 1st, somehow capable of doing feats that seemed hard before.

Be realistic

As someone who has kept a number of New Year’s resolutions, I think it’s quite possible to set goals and follow through. But we have to be realistic. New habits often take a lot of practice — figuring out what works, what is compelling, what fits with life, and doing these things over and over again until they feel rote. You can ramp that up on January 1st, but if you’d like to start out strong in the new year, another option is to use these next few days as practice time.

For lots of sports, the official season is preceded by a “pre-season.” The teams practice, and sometimes do some competitions that don’t officially count. The purpose of all this is to get in shape for the actual season by approximating a lot of what happens when it is game time.

We can do this for resolutions as well. What could you do in the next few days to get in shape for your goals? How can you engage in the behavior you’re hoping to adopt in a low-key way?

Practice makes it happen

For instance, one of my goals a few years ago was to listen to all the works of Bach. So I created a calendar of what I needed to listen to each day, and before the year actually started, I experimented with how the listening would fit in my life. When could I listen to 30-40 minutes of Bach per day? I soon realized that I could do a lot of my daily listening while driving around in the car, as long as I searched up YouTube performances beforehand, so they could be playing in the background. Once I’d listened to 30 minutes of Bach every day for a week, I was pretty sure I could keep going into the new year. And I did!

Likewise, in the coming year I want to do a short strength training session at least three times a week. So, for the past few weeks, I’ve put three sessions on my priority list for each week, and have dutifully done them and crossed them off. No need to wait until January 1st. Having built the habit of fitting three such sessions into my life, weekly, during November and December, I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to keep doing that after January 1st, and into February. But if I’d seen that it just didn’t work, this would have let me know that I needed to adjust my goal — before I got to the point of declaring my resolution a failure.

How might you treat the next few days as goal preseason? How could you practice your resolutions so that, come January 1st, you’ll be well-positioned for success? January does offer up a lot of fresh start energy, but the new year won’t be magical if you don’t know exactly how you’ll make your goals work. Practicing your resolutions just might get you in the right mindset.