Most people will set a New Year’s resolution as a wish, something they would like or ‘want’, but have no drive to pursue.

Studies have shown of those who set resolutions that only 8% will achieve what they set out to accomplish. How crazy is that? Only 8%!

Of the other 92%, many of those who attempt their resolution will give up around ten days into the new year. By the second week of February, 80% of those who set out with resolutions have given up.

Why do you suppose that is?

The resolutions are typically made during a time of impulse and indulgence. We set foot to challenge ourselves with a rich vein of well-meaning goals to achieve. We hail in a new year with an idea and the energy of celebration.

In most cases, resolutions are wishes. Things people would like to have or want to have. They are things that would be nice. Many of them are good intentions.

The reason most of the resolutions fail is because nothing is done in order to increase or enhance the capacity in which they can be achieved and sustain the motivation. We then cave and crumble to the inevitable pressures and stresses we put on ourselves because we realise we aren’t likely to achieve our goals.

We are creatures of habit and for most of us, it is because behavior change is hard. We find comfort in what is regular and usual for us. Anything outside of that causes friction and dissonance.

The resolutions tend not to be well thought out. We haven’t worked on ways to make new habits easy to do and ways to make them stick. The changes we intend feel foreign and against what we have been conditioned against. Without having properly prepared for them, we are doomed to fail. There is no plan on how we will execute the goal and we set ourselves up to fail, to give up.

Being the creature of habit, without really defining the goals and the processes to get there, more often than not, we slip right back into old ways. We stress ourselves out because of the emotional and mental friction and we revert back to what is easy.

We give up due to self-sabotage, feel bad for ourselves and then write it off for the rest of the year.

And the cycle continues… but it doesn’t have to.