Why Managers Fail at New Year Resolutions and What Works

Jimmy: So, what are your resolutions going to be? What are you going to take on that is a new habit, a new goal with clear purpose that's going to help you be more impactful?
Welcome back to this week's episode of The High Performance Leader, the podcast for leaders working in complex, challenging environments to gain insights and ideas which help you increase your impact without burning out and to help you build a high-performance culture in your team. I'm your host, Jimmy Burroughes. And if you're new to The High Performance Leader, make sure you subscribe or follow so you don't miss any of our upcoming episodes before you put down your device.
Hello, and welcome back to this week's episode of The High Performance Leader. Yes, it's me, Jimmy, doing a solo episode again. And I thought, as we are now a little bit of a ways into the new year, we would talk about the challenge, the problem, the issue with New Year's resolutions. But actually, I'm not going to be talking about: Are you making New Year's resolutions? I'm going to be talking about: When you break them, what should you do now? And how can we start to rethink the idea of resolutions with something a little bit different? So, let's get into it. Now, how many of you have made a resolution this year? Did you make one? Did you vow to lose weight, stop drinking alcohol, give up sugar, go for a run every day? More gym memberships are taken out in January than any other month of the year, as you can probably imagine. And yet, when somebody offers you a doughnut, when you get that invite down the pub, or when you are suddenly given the opportunity to stay up late and watch that movie when you vowed to go to bed early, we all cave. And research shows that by the end of January, more than 90% of New Year's resolutions have been broken.
So, clearly, they're not a super useful tool for high-performance leaders. And this breaking of New Year's resolutions seems to have some issues. We feel like we've failed. We feel like perhaps we aren't, you know, "I've failed now. Uh there's no point in carrying on." And perhaps we could do with some new ways of thinking about it. So, let's get into it. Well, for me, I've made New Year's resolutions for many years, and I gave up making them about four, five years ago. In fact, around the same time as JBL started. And one of the reasons why I gave up making them was because I got very disheartened in the fact that I put these big, grand plans onto myself in January, and then as a self-employed person, I would have to crank the business up again, and I got busy, and would be excited by starting new projects, and I decided to do something that I just couldn't commit to. It wasn't sustainable. And so, having this everybody's-doing-this-new-thing-in-January, one-size-fits-all approach didn't really work for me. I'm a fairly unconventional guy. And so having a one-size-fits-all solution was not great for me. Equally, probably biting off more than I could chew, you know, the desire to lose 10 kg, or give up alcohol, or whatever it was that I decided to do that year, was probably fairly unrealistic, going cold turkey. It takes an awful lot of willpower, and for those of you who know anything about the way your brain works, it's extremely convincing to try and convince you to just eat that doughnut, take that chocolate bar, sink that pint, whatever it might be.
And I also realized that I hadn't really got to the bottom of my underlying motivation. You know, it was: Give up alcohol because I wanted to give up alcohol, not because I was maybe seeing something that I wanted to gain out of that, maybe a clarity of mind, or better mental health, or whatever it might be. Or: Lose 10 kg just because I wanted to lose 10 kg, not because I'd really considered the motivation. And what I also noticed is that when we suddenly set a New Year's resolution for ourselves, we don't really go through a new habit forming process. In fact, we just say, "Okay, I'm not eating chocolate cake anymore." But we know from the science of habit formation that there's a a three-step process. We need a cue, we need a routine, and we need a reward. And repeating that cue, routine, reward process strengthens the neural pathways to a new habit. But when you're depriving yourself of something, it doesn't feel very rewarding. When you suddenly commit to running 5 miles a day, the reward doesn't feel very rewarding. So, it's very hard to keep with a new habit. You have either got a pain at the end of it, neural pain or physical pain, or that you haven't spent any time building up to that new habit. So, that can make it really, really challenging.
Equally, we see that people tend to go big, and then when they fail, they feel like big failures. You know, so, "I'm going to run 5 miles a day. I'm never going to drink alcohol ever again. I'm going to lose 10 kilos." Maybe if we started a bit smaller with a goal that was perhaps more achievable, and then consistently repeated that through the course of the year, then it might be a better way of doing it. So, what I'd like to do is challenge the concept of resolutions and rename them to resolutions, resolutions, because, essentially, we're all, as high-performance leaders, problem solvers. And the problem we have is we want to be better leaders. We want to be higher impact. And so, we need to get some new solutions. And resolutions don't work. So, resolutions are how we start taking a new approach, a different solution to some of those age-old problems, those age-old challenges that we might have been struggling with.
And this leverages so much of the work that we've talked about previously, the idea of curiosity, exploring some stuff. Chapter 4 of the book is all about exploring and learning and curiosity. It's about trying some things and seeing what works, adjusting your approach, resolutioning your life. And this is really great for your growth. It's not a one-size-fits-all solution, because this is something that's completely unique. Nobody's resolutioning in January, and it doesn't matter if it's now February, or March, or April. You can start resolutioning now. "I tried that. It didn't work for me in January. I'll try something new and see if I can get that to work for me. My goal is still the same." And what we want to do is identify: What is the purpose of what you're doing? Is it to get that beach body? Is it to have a healthier life? Can you really commit to that? And is there a purpose outside of yourself?
For those of you who are close to me, will know that I recently had welcomed a daughter into the world, and my wife and I spent a lot of time talking about making healthy eating choices, cutting back on snacks and junk food and alcohol, because why? We want to be around for her when we're older. We don't want to have a shortened life. So, the purpose now of making those better choices is not for us necessarily, it's for her. So, the resolutioning has been finding the external purpose that is a higher purpose than just because I want to lose weight and eat healthier, which is very hard to do. Every time now somebody dangles a cake in front of me, I'm like, "Is that going to get me one step closer to fitness or fatness?"
Hey, there. Jimmy here. Hope you're well. I just wanted to drop into this podcast and let you know that my new book, Beat Burnout, Ignite Performance: The Leader's Playbook for Building a High Performance Culture, is going to be released very soon. And if you haven't already, head over to my website and grab yourself the first chapter of the book, absolutely free. The address you want to go to is beatburnout.jimmyburroughes.com/book, and you can download that first free chapter to get you interested and excited about the topic of purpose. And the reason we're giving it away for free is because we think that purpose is the single most important factor for beating burnout, and we want to get it into as many hands as possible. So, head over to beatburnout.jimmyburroughes.com/book. Grab Beat Burnout, Ignite Performance: The Leader's Playbook for Building a High Performance Culture, and enjoy reading.
Equally, when you're resolutioning, you can start to think about atomic habits and starting small, chunking things down. Again, you don't have to lose 10 kg in January, you could lose 1 kg for 10 months. That's a much better way of forming a habit. So, equally, maybe start off in January, or February, or March with one day of healthy eating per week or even one meal per week, where you make a better healthy choice. And then you start to resolution your life. Equally, it doesn't feel as scary. If you fall over and you fail on one meal or one day, it's not the end of the world. You can get back to it tomorrow. But you start to encourage the dopamine dance for this new, curious exploration that you're going on. You're resolutioning new habits. And if you can habit-stack as well, that makes things a lot easier. What does habit stacking mean? It's where you add something that you want to adopt as a new habit alongside an older habit.
So, let me give you an example. One of the ones that I've recently come across with an elderly friend who is going through some health and balance issues, as he ages, his muscle tone and neural fibers are not working as well as they did previously. And his doctor said, "Why don't you stand on one leg while you're brushing your top teeth? And then when you move to your bottom teeth, stand on the other leg." And all he's doing is habit stacking cleaning his teeth, something he does every day, with a new habit, building proprioceptor and neural connections for balance back into his brain and reaffirming those connections. So, that's a very simple example of habit stacking. So, another one could be, whilst you are doing the washing up, you think about the most important thing to do tomorrow. Or equally, while you're taking out the trash, you maybe jog back or you do five push-ups when you get to the bins. All of those are simply something you already do added to something that you want to build, grow, or gain capability of.
So, what are your resolutions going to be? What are you going to take on that is a new habit, a new goal with clear purpose that's going to help you be more impactful? There's so many things you could try. And I would love for you to drop me a note, drop me a comment against this podcast episode that just shares some ideas amongst the couple of thousand people now that are listening to this podcast. What are you doing that's going to resolution? And maybe we can steal some of each other's ideas with pride. Equally, I would love to know, where have you previously fallen off the wagon that you can now see hope or you have identified a new way of attacking this challenge that you've had for a while? And what emotions or triggers are likely to get in the way of you really struggling with this? It can be really dispiriting if you do fall off the wagon, and we can feel like failures and losers, and whatever it is. But the reality is you've only missed one session, one day, so you can get back on the wagon tomorrow. But how did that make you feel when you initially failed and when you got back into it?
Have we got any people here who are a religious, completely anti, the opposite of what I'm saying and are staunch New Year's resoluters and have done fantastic every year? What's your secret? Share it with us. We'd love to know. Um most importantly though, for all of you who are listening, when you start to resolution, just keep a track of your wins. Make sure that those You're celebrating a week, a month, a year, maybe even one day or one meal where you've been successful, and just watch it stack up. With many of my clients, I do an exercise called, Don't Break The Chain, and they literally print out a calendar from whichever calendar app they want they use, and every day, they do the thing, and they put a cross in the box on the calendar. And as long as they put a cross every day, that's all they have to worry about. It's very, very good for, "I just have to do it today. And if I have a break, then I start again tomorrow," whatever it may be. But keeping a track of your wins is really great. When you look at the end of the month at the sheet, and there's no gaps on that sheet, wow, what a great feeling that can be. And then you start to look in the mirror, and you're a kilo lighter, what a great feeling that will be. When you start to see that stack up over the course of a year, and you're running every day, what a great feeling that will be. But it starts small, build it up sustainably, and resolution your life.
So, today we've talked all about resolutioning, the transformative power of taking those old resolutions, turning them on their head, getting more curious, exploring more, and taking a bit of more of a dynamic approach to becoming a high-impact leader. I recommend you go and try this. Uh we've seen some great success the last couple of years with the clients who are resolutioning. And I would love to talk to anybody who, I say, agrees or disagrees with the ideas that we're having here, because it makes such a great difference to have a robust conversation, cuz it builds and grows all of our thinking. You know, if I were to tell you a few years ago, I was 25 kg heavier than I am now, and I resolutioned my life by making some very small, different choices, it's extremely possible that you can also do more than I've ever thought possible. You can absolutely achieve incredible things. And so, I would love to keep in touch, and I hope you enjoyed today's episode of The High Performance Leader. Speak soon.
That's it for this week's episode of The High Performance Leader. If you enjoyed this episode, please drop a review on whichever platform you listened on. We really appreciate it, and it helps us to connect with new listeners. Also, if you haven't already, head to jimmyburroughes.com and download a copy of my latest best seller, Beat Burnout, Ignite Performance. It's the leader's playbook for building a high-performance culture and is packed with practical, action tips to get you started. Stay tuned for next week's episode of game-changing insights and ideas on The High Performance Leader.