How to Reclaim Your New Year's Resolutions

Many people set New Year’s Resolutions at the beginning of the year. If you’re like me, it’s an exciting time. You spend weeks thinking about all the wonderful things you would like to accomplish. There are the clichés like losing weight, working out more, or accomplishing more at work. Or you might be trying to carve out time for a hobby you enjoy. You spend time crafting these goals and wording them just right. You categorize them, you number them, you analyze them to see how they’ll fit into you life once that calendar page flips.

You may even go the extra mile and outline exactly how you plan to achieve those goals. You talk to your friends and family about the workouts you plan to do once you get that new gym membership. You plan out all the healthy snacks you’ll stock your refrigerator with. You can already imagine getting rid of those old clothes you don’t like anymore and fitting into that pair of jeans that are now uncomfortably tight. You’re riding the goal setting high!

Fast forward six weeks past the new year. Can you even remember the goals you set? How long did you stick with them? All of January? Just the first week? Maybe you didn’t even last a day for the more ambitious ones. Even if you completely abandoned them in the early hours of January 1st, don’t despair. There is hope for redemption yet.

Identity Change

What’s even more important than setting goals is establishing the right behavior, or becoming the right person who will achieve those goals. That is what James Clear’s Atomic Habits is all about. I have read several other excellent books about habit formation but Clear strikes a fantastic balance between outlining the background information and giving you the tools you need to form habits. The book is grounded in the best research and knowledge about how habits are formed, why they are useful, and how they can transform your life but he also gives you actionable, and dare I say easy, methods of implementing new habits in your life that will help you reach your full potential.

Clear’s philosophy is to focus less on what you want to accomplish, which he calls outcome change, and more on who you want to be, or identity change. This powerful mental switch creates motivation that lasts much longer because failure to meet your outcomes in short term doesn’t automatically mean you’re not still headed in the right direction. Understanding the process by which habits are made creates more durable motivation that can sustain you through a rough patch or two. This lets you focus on a system that yields small incremental improvements that lead to long-term, meaningful change.

Check out more of the highlights from the book by reading my summary.