Everyone has heard the saying, ‘New year, new me.’ The start of a new year is the perfect time to turn the page and start fresh, which is why so many people have turned to the New Year’s resolutions tradition. These resolutions are often used as a great opportunity to change bad habits and establish new routines to help you grow and empower yourself through challenge, fear, and adversity, which demonstrates the leadership of one’s self.
While it’s easy to make these resolutions and set these goals, they are much harder to keep and many are abandoned after just 3 months when we settle back into the comfort of our old habits. So how do we keep these resolutions and not throw them out so early on? We’ll get to that, but it’s first important to understand the motivation behind the goal and why we set them.
Why Do We Make Resolutions?
Everyone loves the feeling of a fresh start. That could be your first day at a new job, moving to a new city, the beginning of a new week or month, or the start of a new year. Researchers have dubbed this term the “fresh start effect” which states that people are more likely to accomplish their goals when they start on a so-called temporal landmark (i.e. Monday, the 1st of the month, the new year). These fresh starts often come after some instance of a failure or sub-par past performance as it’s human nature to want to improve, grow, and perform better today than we did yesterday. On the contrary, these fresh starts don’t always work in your favor, especially when past performances are successes rather than failures.
So why do we make resolutions? Because when you’re inspired to accomplish a goal and have the drive and motivation to do so, the possibilities are endless for what you can achieve. This all starts with making a plan to track your results. If you can’t show yourself the results or progress for your goal, you will forget why you are working towards this goal and lose the motivation to continue. How we keep these resolutions sounds easy, but takes real level-one leadership of one’s self in order to stay on track.
1. Track Your Performance
This is not the time to rely on gut feelings as they won’t work here. You must actively track your goal performance and if you fail to do so, you won’t have a clear understanding of where you are currently or what direction you’re heading towards. This can be a tedious task and the part of goal-setting that many of us often despise as it gives you a level of brutal honesty, but is well worth it.
Keep your goals simple, give yourself a limit, and ask a friend or a loved one for support. When tracking performance, it’s best to keep it as simple as possible and limit the amount of work required to input your personal data. By doing this, you increase the likelihood of actually doing it consistently. To avoid becoming overly preoccupied with your personal progress, give yourself a daily or weekly time slot for when you make a note to check your progress levels. Accountability can be the biggest issue when it comes to tracking your progress and staying on track. Never hesitate to reach out to someone you trust and ask them to help keep track of your progress for you. This is a proven method to consistently track progress and may also improve the likelihood that you will perform well.
2. Think BIG
Great! You’ve been tracking your progress and things are looking great for you, assuming you’re coming out of a period of success and not failure. But how can you keep the momentum going? Now is the time to avoid any sort of ‘reset’ and ensure that you are mentally viewing your progress in a smooth, and consistent manner. By framing your performance progress as part of an ongoing series, you can avoid the feeling of a fresh start. It’s important to always remember to stay away from restarts in times of success.
Research shows that exposing yourself to your own achievements can serve as motivation to keep up the good work and continue to move towards your goal. When you become proficient at tracking progress, you’ll no longer fear the intimidation of checking in every day. In fact, you want to overemphasize your exposure to your past progress. Another way to maintain focus on the big picture is to keep your old data handy. This gives you the ability to look at past and present data side by side and see your progress. By viewing these reports in a continuous manner, you will avoid that ‘fresh start’ feeling when the next landmark arrives.
3. Know When It’s Time for a Fresh Start
So you’re one month in and looking at your personal progress when you’re overcome by feelings of self-doubt. It’s typical to feel the urge to latch onto fresh starts when we’re faced with poor performance. Now is the time to narrow down your focus and ditch the big-picture perspective.
Your old failures become virtually useless to you once you’ve received the feedback you need to improve. So now is the time to get rid of the evidence. But make sure you take some time to analyze the trends of your past performance before you throw it all out. Our past performances can strongly influence our motivation to perform in the future. Our successes can motivate future endeavors and past failures can blunt self-efficacy, motivation, and performance. To avoid this, have your progress report as visually narrow as possible and only allow yourself to view the current week’s progress. It’s best to approach ‘fresh starts’ when performance isn’t up to par and an easy way to do this is by using the closest temporal landmark date to start new again. You don’t need to wait for the new year or a new month to invoke the feeling of a fresh start and in fact, we are 62.9% more likely to commit to a goal when we begin at the start of the week.
Empower Yourself at Empower Adventures Tampa Bay!
Empower Adventures isn’t actually a zip line business. All of our different adventures are specifically designed with leadership principles in mind to help people grow. At each Empower Adventures property, it’s our intention to empower guests and groups through adventure experiences in order to be the best version of themselves. That means giving each guest an experience that will help them feel stronger and more confident about who they are, improve their ability to face their fears and overcome challenges in their lives, and feel energized to make bold decisions towards living their best life.
If you’re looking for a fresh start and need some motivation and empowerment to begin, check out Empower Adventures Tampa Bay.
