I was struck today by the following request made on the Training Journal Daily Digest:

“Now that we are mid-way into January, we here at the Training Journal wondered how many of you have managed to stick to your New Year’s resolutions about continuous personal development?”

What does it say about New Year’s resolutions – or about those of us who make them – that they so famously fall by the wayside by the end of January?

Now, one could write a book on this subject – there’s far more to say than I am going to say in this posting. Today, I’m going to confine myself to just two observations.

The first is this. How many of us make our New Year’s resolutions from a place of “should” and “ought”? I should give up smoking. I ought to lose weight. I must go to the gym. These are the resolutions we are most likely to sabotage. Perhaps we don’t get started. Perhaps we make a token effort and quickly stop taking action. Maybe we even carry out those resolutions by the letter – but not by the spirit. This latter seems to be particularly true when our half-hearted resolutions are to provide support for others. Have you ever, for example, been so frustrated by the spirit in which your spouse (or kid) carries out an agreement (to unload the dishwasher, pick up the kids, etc.) that you’ve asked them to stop.

Now it may be that the thing you feel you ought to do is the thing you really want to do. And this brings me to my second observation about New Year’s resolutions. Often, between the recognition that you want to do something and the actions needed to carry it out, there are a number of steps needed to create the inner resolve needed to take action. So if you’ve moved straight from “wanting to get fit” to “going twice a week to the gym” you may have overlooked key factors that are standing in the way. Why, for example, did you not go twice a week to the gym last year? Here, too, I could say a whole lot more than can be said in a single posting.

So I close with an invitation, which is to notice how gladly you feel about doing those things you’ve resolved to do this year. As a coach, I often invite my clients to give a “mark out of ten” as a way of gauging where they’re starting from. If your mark is anything less than ten, even if you yearn to achieve your intended outcomes, perhaps you need to pay attention to the inner resistance that’s holding you back as well as to take action towards your goals.

Perhaps, even, with the help of a coach…