Voices: Take it from me as a life coach: ditch your New Year’s resolutions
Voices: Take it from me as a life coach: ditch your New Year’s resolutions
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Good intentions aside, resolutions without a plan are a bit of a waste of time and energy, Rhea Freeman writes. I don’t know about you, but when I hear anyone utter anything about New Year’s resolutions, I sigh. Sometimes internally, often externally. It’s not because I don’t want people to have goals and better themselves in the New Year, it’s just that, well, there’s a lot of evidence that resolutions don’t work. Never being one for small talk, I feel like resolutions without a plan are a bit of a waste of time and energy… but you can’t say that to people that don’t get it, can you?.
As a business coach and mentor who works with businesses and individuals around achieving their goals and developing themselves, I don’t want to be ‘that person’ that launches into a lecture whenever there’s an opportunity, or tells people trying to pass the time of day why their vague resolution is unlikely to succeed, but it’s the truth. As one of my objectives for this year is to help people understand more about how they can achieve their goals (actually, I’ve written a whole book, You’ve Got This, about this), this seems like a good place to start.
One of the main issues is the structure of a resolution. You want to eat less chocolate, lose more weight, get fitter, get a new job, spend less time on your phone – these are wishy washy statements. What does less mean? Are we talking about putting one of the Heroes back in the tub or a total ban? If we want to shed some weight, how much are we talking? A pound or a stone? You get the idea. Applying the fundamentals of goal setting to resolutions doesn’t just make them clearer, they also become more achievable.
