Do you make New Year’s resolutions? About half of us do. The other half of us think they are silly. Pie crust promises, as Mary Poppins calls them. Easily made and more easily broken. But, have you ever made a New Year’s resolution at 11:59 and broken it by 12:01?
Mine was, “This year, I’m going to get more and better sleep each night.” I made it about an hour after take off on the flight back from Susan’s and my anniversary think week in Hawaii. Right before midnight. Just as I dozed off thinking how silly New Year’s resolutions are. And then, not two minutes later, something in my subconscious poked me in my third eye and said, “No, they are not.”
So, having quickly broken my pie crust, I switched on the Southwest Airlines wifi and tried to justify how I felt about New Year’s resolutions. Let me tell you what I found out.
Most of us are not quite as fast I was to break resolutions. According to John Norcross’s ongoing research at University of Scranton, about only 70% of us make it for two weeks, only half of us make it three months, and only one in five of us resolvers can say we have successfully maintained a New Year’s change for two years.
Nonetheless, Norcross’s research does show that resolvers are ten times more likely to make a change last than nonresolvers to make change last. That’s 10,000 percent more likely, friends. 10,000%!
So, the question to which everyone obviously wants the answer so they can use it is, “How do they do it?”
Which is exactly why I have just bought John’s book, Changeology, and have started reading it cover to cover. I’ll let you know how it goes. If you want to try it yourself, here’s a link to the book on Amazon. (Note: this is an affiliate link. It won’t cost you any more to buy it through this link, but I’ll pick up a few pennies for recommending it to you. See my FTC disclosure below.)
We’ll talk more after chapter one.
[reminder]Are you a New Year’s resolver? Yes or no?[/reminder]