How to make a resolution stick (1/5)
Strategy and tactics for finally making massive changes this new year.
It’s a familiar story every new year. Thousands of people making resolutions to get in shape, transform their health and finally feel and look well. A few weeks, or at best months, down the line and they’ve failed, maybe even given up. New years rolls around next year and they’ve failed. They look and feel the same if not worse than the year before. I’ve been helping people make meaningful improvements to their health, physique and performance for two decades and I want to share with you the strategy and tactics that can make it actually work, and help you see massive results in 2025.
This is a series of six articles, so keep your eyes peeled for further instalments if you find this opening piece useful.
Step One: Dare to start small enough.
“Small enough”? Yes small enough. It’s fine to have a big hairy audacious goal of a men’s health cover body, a 100lb weight loss, or a first triathlon. But huge goals are achieved with thousands of tiny steps taken consistently over a sustained period of time. You cannot just simply make a huge change. In fact, try to make too much change to quickly and your chances of success plummet. The brain automates almost all our consistent behaviours into habits and those habits form a sort of life operating system. Try to make too big of a change to the system and the amount of energy, awareness, will power, and effort required to get to the point where those behaviours are unconscious and consistent is too much. It drains you, it is constant effort. In this state, eventually, for some reason or another, you will fail, you will deviate, and you will likely fall off the wagon.
But make a very small change, one thats almost embarrassingly easy, and your chances of making that one, small behaviour stick are actually very high. Once that change is starting to feel normal, engrained, effortless, you can add another small change on top. Just like with compounding interest, these incremental, but compounding changes add up quite quickly to massive changes over a sustained period of months.
Let me illustrate this with two contrasting examples. Last year, a client told me about a member of staff of his who had made the New Year’s resolution to “get in shape, quit smoking, and quit drinking”. Noble goals I fully support. But my response was “I give him a week”. And sure enough next time I saw that same client I asked, and all three resolutions had been broken. That, my friends, is way too much change to actually achieve unless its life and death. The goal was awesome, the strategy was fatally flawed.
Contrast that with something we see all the time at our training centre in Nottingham. Client comes in overweight, drinking too much and rarely doing any structured exercise. One year later, they are in great shape, training 4-6 days a week, park runs at the weekend, and drinking a non-destructive amount. Yes the coaching and support helps greatly. But its the strategy that matters. We start with 30 minute session three times a week and a change to breakfast. That’s it. We add small changes and improvements every few weeks. We change your way of life at a pace you can nail down and build on gradually. Within 3-6 months, your lifestyle has evolved significantly, but you don’t feel like its been a tough slog of will power. It’s been gradual and relatively easy, even enjoyable.
The person in that first example could have had much greater success with this strategy. For example. “I’m going to get in shape, quit drinking, quit smoking”. That’s the goal, the strategy is compounding small changes, the tactics could be as follows:
Starting stats (Made up); smokes 6 a day, drink it’s 4-5 beers 4-5 days a week, exercises never.
Week 1: Join a gym, and every day, dress in gym clothes and go to the gym for your morning shower. (That’s right, don’t even train). This starts to build the habit of getting up early and putting on gym clothes and leaving the house, traveling to the gym and going to work from there.
Week 2: when at the gym, train for 20 minutes. Click this link for a free guide on a 20 minute per day workout routine that covers all bases and explains why only 20 minutes works. You don’t even need to give us an email address, its a gift.
Week 3: limit alcohol to three drinks instead of 4-5.
Keep this up for 52 weeks and your change is profound, you are unrecognisable. The process felt quite easy and natural, the new habits are engrained and feel normal. This is how to make a resolution really stick, and make huge changes this year.
Next post in this series: Forming new habits: The do’s and dont’s of successful habit formation. I’ll show you how to choose the right behaviours to target, and how to make them habitual and easy as fast as possible.
