How you Can Effortlessly Create a New Year Resolutions you Will Actually Keep  

We have all heard it before. 

…. Make a new year resolutions every January….

…Make the new year resolutions SMART…  

…It takes 21 days to make a habit…

And who has made SMART goals and implemented them for 21 days only to hit day 25, 26, 27 and the habit slowly disappears? 

Hand raised! 

Then comes the flood of self-deprecating thoughts, lowered self-esteem and a whole lotta self-loathing in a family sized bag of dill pickle chips…. 

This was my pattern for years. I would create the new years resolutions, I would make a SMART goal, bust my butt for the first 3 weeks and slowly but surely, I would fall back into old patterns. Or, if I did achieve a goal (like running a half marathon), as soon as my goal was completed I fell back into old patterns and never ran again.

Can you relate? 

And guess what...

It is not because we are not a goal oriented people.

It is not because we do not have determination and work ethic.

It is not because we are lazy or unwilling to put in the effort.

It is because process and outcome SMART based goals do not work for LASTING change.  

Often SMART goals are so focused on the result that they have us splitting our choices into ‘good or bad’ which usually leaves us with feelings of anxiety, overwhelm and that annoying little gremlin popping up over our shoulder telling us we are not good enough.

Then we say F*ck it, and get stuck in our patterns for another year, only to repeat this pattern next December.   

Want to Learn Another Way? 

If you are interested in learning how to make a better life for yourself and create LASTING change in 2022 and Beyond, check out my Free Goal Setting Worksheet Here! 

You see the problem that I have with SMART goals is that they ONLY look at the behaviour level which we want to change.

And often they are focused solely on materialistic and superficial goals. 

They don’t delve deeper into our identities and what we really want from our personal goal setting. 

Types of Goals

To understand a little more about goals, let’s dig into some background information for you. In the goal setting arena, often people focus on SMART goals surrounding outcomes and processes; solely influencing our future behaviours. 

↠ Outcome based (what you want) – I want to go from weighing 175 lbs to 150 lbs 

↠ Process based (how you will get there) - I am going to go to the gym 3 times per week and cut out 3500 calories per week.

However, in order to make real change in our lives we MUST focus on the third type of goal setting surrounding our identities.

↠ Identity based (what I BELIEVE I am)  – I am a fit, healthy woman who fuels her body with the nutrients I need to have the energy to take on the day ahead.  

The thing about SMART goals is that they are beneficial for setting process and outcome based goals for very specific, short term, and result-driven desires in your life. However, they are not as beneficial when we want to make LASTING change in our life.

The reason being, SMART goals miss the IDENTITY SHIFT that we need to make to begin living the life that we so deeply desire. 

Why SMART Goals Don’t Work for Lasting Change

First, we all have preconceived notions about what we can and cannot do. Who we are and who we are not. So if you always see yourself as an overweight person who hates exercise; or someone who will never make money… well you probably won’t keep the weight off or make money.

Neuroscience tell us that 95% of who we are by the time we are 35 years old is a set of memorized behaviors and emotional reactions that create an identity subconsciously.

So essentially, as Dr. Joe Dispenza (a thought leader in the Quantum Physics field) explains, only 5% of our conscious mind (the part of our mind we use every day) is working against 95% of what we have memorize subconsciously (the part of our mind that stores our beliefs and stories about ourselves).

MIND BLOWN.

Read that again and let it sink in.

This is why so often it is difficult to really stick to these SMART goals and turn them into lifelong habits and identities.

Secondly, life is messy. We get thrown off track. Our kid gets sick. We get stuck with a huge bill we weren’t expecting. We lose someone we love. Wrenches get thrown into our well intentioned, precisely organized container meal planning and we find ourselves delving into a Big Mac with extra cheese at the local drive-thru. Thus propelling us into our negative reel of why we are not good enough once again.

SMART Goals often lead us to try and constantly organize the chaos of life and if we do not, then we often find ourselves going down the rabbit hole of failure, self-loathing and confirming our internal beliefs that we aren’t worthy and we should just give up.   

And cue the groundhog day movie meme. 

How to Keep New Year Resolutions. Learn Another way to Set Life goals for the Year

So how do you then still move forward with your life and stop getting stuck on this hamster wheel?

You begin to be the Intentional Cultivator of our life.  

You make Intentions and create a life vision for the year ahead and get passionate again about your dreams, goals and life... 

You start being INTENTIONAL and embracing an intentional lifestyle. 

When you begin to make intentions with overarching themes that we want to live by,  You will shift from focusing on things that really don’t matter in the grand scheme of life, to figuring out how you want to show up every day.

This shift allows you to create a meaningful sustainable and attainable ‘goals’. 

Creating intentions for your life with identity based goals will keep you grounded in the present while still aligning for the future. Thus raising your energetic vibrations and reprogramming your subconscious mind (you know the one that controls 95% of our beliefs) so you can make long term lasting changes in your life and begin embodying your ideal life.  

Want to go deeper?  Amplify Your Life with the following tools:

FREE INTENTION SETTING WORKBOOK

VISION BOARDING 101 – YOUR TOTAL GUIDE TO VISION BOARDING

INTENTIONAL LIVING 101- YOUR STEP by STEP GUIDE TO LIVING MORE INTENTIONALLY

Other articles to help you live a more intentional life. 

10 Intentional + Holistic New Year Resolutions for Alignment in 2021

150 'Word of the Year' Ideas for your Personal Goal Setting

15 Ways to to Live a More Intentional Life

7 Benefits of Intentional Living