#26: New Year’s Resolutions That Work: Personalization and Evidence-Based Strategies
Jan 7, 2025
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Forget failing resolutions! Discover a six-step guide to making New Year's goals stick. Learn to assess your life holistically and identify key focus areas. Dive deep into setting specific, positive objectives while building supportive networks. Find out how personalizing these evidence-based strategies enhances your chances of success. Plus, explore the importance of accountability and adapting your goals as needed. This is more than just planning; it’s about creating real and lasting change!
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Quick takeaways
A systematic six-step approach, starting with assessing your baseline health, is crucial for achieving personalized New Year's resolutions.
Establishing a supportive infrastructure with accountability mechanisms enhances motivation and helps maintain commitment to health-related goals.
Deep dives
Understanding the High Rate of Resolution Failure
Most New Year's resolutions, particularly those focused on health, tend to fail, with striking statistics highlighting this trend. For instance, 80% of gym memberships are canceled within the first five months, indicating a disconnect between intention and action. Research shows that only 19% of individuals remain committed to their resolutions two years later, while 46% manage to sustain their goals for at least six months. In contrast, only 8% of people without resolutions achieve similar health goals, underscoring the relative advantage of having a resolution, even if success is elusive.
Six Steps to Effective Resolutions
To enhance the likelihood of success, a systematic approach to New Year's resolutions can be beneficial, outlined in six crucial steps. The first step is to assess your baseline across various health pillars, including exercise, nutrition, and sleep. After evaluating your starting point, develop a prioritized list of potential resolutions, narrowing it down to a small number that are specific and positively framed. Finally, implement a monitoring system to track progress and ensure that the new behaviors align with personalized goals.
Building Support and Adjusting Goals
Creating a supportive infrastructure is essential for maintaining motivation and accountability throughout the resolution journey. This can include having a workout partner, tracking progress with journals, or seeking professional guidance from trainers. It's also important to remain flexible and ready to refine your resolutions as needed, recognizing that setbacks are a common part of the process. Studies show that many people experience slips, but the key is to restart and readjust rather than abandon efforts altogether.
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Effective Strategies for New Year's Resolutions: A Six-Step Guide
Do you want 2025 to finally be the year you set and achieve your New Year's Resolutions? Want to avoid the traps and pitfalls that keep most people from the finish line?
In this episode, I will discuss effective strategies for setting and achieving New Year's resolutions, particularly focusing on health-related goals but can be used in any important area of life. I will present to you a six-step approach that includes assessing one's baseline, developing focus areas, setting specific and positive goals, building support systems, and refining resolutions as needed.
This episode will give you a chance to personalize these strategies and are research backed so you'll get the best of both worlds to achieve your goals this year. Below the time stamps are a detailed explanation of each step so you can follow along and listen at the same time.
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Step 1: Assess Your Baseline: Holistically assess and reflect on your life. Take your time here as it will make a huge difference in the later steps. Below are some examples and guidelines for this step.
How are you doing with the 6 pillars: Exercise, Sleep, Nutrition, Mind-Body Harmony, Exposure to Heat/Cold, and Social Relationships
Assess Your Risk Factor Profile: Metrics including blood pressure, smoking, weight, diabetes, alcohol consumption.
Preventive Care: getting screening/vaccines.
Health Type: Knowing your health type and personalizing this process to you.
Step 2: Develop A List of Possible Areas: Make this list as long as you want as we will prioritize and shorten in an upcoming step.
Step 3: Set Your Goals/Resolutions: Set a small number of the most important goals to you on your list and create them in a positive light with additions to your life rather than negatives to stop.
Step 4: Create Your N of 1 Monitoring Approach: Measure your baseline, start the intervention, and measure progress.
Step 5: Build Your Infrastructure of Support: Get support both from external factors (trainers, friends, etc) along with internal habits and tracking.
Step 6: Refine As Needed: You'll probably find you will need to make adjustments along the way and not only is that completely okay but that is expected.