Every January the gym car park fills up. Running shoes come out of their boxes, new notebooks get their first page of plans, and a familiar promise gets made: this year will be different. By the middle of February, the car park has its old gaps back.
It's tempting to blame willpower, or to look for a way to "condition" your mind for success with the right mantra or vision board. The real answer is kinder and more useful. How you set a goal, and what you do in the first few weeks, matters far more than how much you want it. Wanting is the easy part.
Ahead: the 4,000-year-old origin of New Year promises, why "do your best" is one of the weakest goals you can set, and the kind of announcement that can sap your effort.
Use a fresh start
New Year promises are about 4,000 years old. Around 2000 BC the Babylonians marked their new year with a twelve-day festival and promised to pay their debts and return borrowed farm tools. The Romans later made their promises to Janus, the two-faced god January is named after, looking back at the old year and forward to the new one.
January is just one of many fresh starts the calendar hands you. Searches for "diet", gym visits and new goal commitments all rose after landmarks in time: the start of a week, a month or a year, a birthday, a holiday. A new chapter makes it easier to leave last month's slips behind.
So if your goal fell apart in February, you can skip the eleven-month wait. Pick the start of next week, the first of next month or your birthday, and begin again there.
Pick a goal that's yours
Before the numbers and the plans, ask whose goal this is. A goal you chose because it fits what you care about is a different animal from one you picked because you felt you should, or because someone else wanted it for you.
People chasing goals that matched their own interests and values put in more sustained effort, were more likely to reach them, and felt better for reaching them. A "should" goal tends to run out of steam the first time it gets hard. If your goal is to lose weight because a relative keeps mentioning it, look for the reason underneath that's yours: keeping up with the grandchildren, sleeping better, feeling strong on a walk.
Make it specific, and a stretch
Seneca put it nearly two thousand years ago: "When a man does not know what harbour he is making for, no wind is the right wind."
"I'll do my best" feels like a sensible goal. It's one of the weakest you can set. Over decades of testing, people given a specific, challenging goal, such as "twenty sales calls this week" or "walk five kilometres by June", consistently did better than people told to do their best. A clear target tells you where to aim, how hard to push, and when you're falling behind.
Word it as something to move toward. "Stop being so lazy" gives you nothing to aim at; "walk to work three days a week" does. People whose goals were mostly about avoiding things felt worse over a term and sensed less progress than people chasing something positive.
The stretch matters too. Easy goals get easy effort. The sweet spot is a goal that makes you lean in a little, but that you can still picture reaching with steady work.
So turn the wish into a number and a date. "Get fitter" becomes "walk thirty minutes, five days a week, for the next six weeks." "Save more" becomes "put away a set amount from every pay cheque until the summer."
Picture the obstacle as well as the finish line
The popular advice is to picture your goal as if it's already happened. It feels lovely, and that's the problem. People who spent their time on glowing fantasies of success, whether a new job, a passed exam or a recovered hip, put in less effort and did worse than people who judged success likely, without the daydream. Enjoying the finish line in advance seems to take some of the hunger out of reaching it.
What works better is holding the goal and the obstacle side by side. Picture what you want, then the main thing inside you or around you that's most likely to get in the way. Holding the two together turned a pleasant daydream into a firm commitment when success was within reach. Gabriele Oettingen's turns this into a simple four-step routine.
Decide when and where
Goals often stall at the moment of action. You meant to go for that walk, and then the evening filled up. The fix is to decide the moment in advance, in the form "when this happens, I'll do that."
"When I get home from work, I'll change into my trainers before I sit down." "When I sit down at my desk in the morning, I'll write my three priorities for the day." Across 94 tests with more than 8,000 people, plans like these made people noticeably more likely to reach their goals. The decision is already made, so the moment arrives with nothing left to argue about. BJ Fogg's builds a whole method around this kind of plan.
Keep the list short, though. When–then plans helped people reach a single goal, but the benefit largely disappeared when they made plans for several goals at once. Seeing every plan laid out side by side made the whole thing look harder, and commitment dropped. One or two goals at a time, each with its own plan, beats ten resolutions on a fridge.
Track your progress on paper
Keeping score keeps you going. Across 138 tests with nearly 20,000 people, keeping track of progress helped people reach their goals, and it worked best when the progress was written down or shared with someone. A tick on a calendar, a line in a notebook, a number on the fridge: seeing the streak grow is its own small reward, and seeing it stall tells you early that something needs to change. If you like everything in one place, a goal planner such as the has room for goals, weekly targets and daily ticks.
Small wins are the fuel. When people at work kept daily diaries, nearly 12,000 entries between them, making progress on something meaningful lifted their mood and motivation more than anything else that happened in a day. Setbacks were the most common cause of a bad one. So break the goal into pieces small enough to finish this week, and let yourself notice each one. "Resolution" first meant breaking something into smaller parts, from the Latin resolvere, to loosen. The sense of firm determination came later, so the word already held the method.
Be careful what you announce
This one may surprise you. Telling others about a goal can backfire, in one particular way. When people's plans to become a certain kind of person (a lawyer, say) were noticed and acknowledged by others, they put in less effort afterwards than people whose plans went unnoticed. Being seen as someone who is going to do it seemed to give them part of the satisfaction early.
Sharing your progress is different, and that's the kind that helped. So skip the grand announcement. Tell a friend what you did this week, and keep who you're going to become to yourself.
Keep learning
Reaching a goal usually means getting better at something along the way. The belief that you can improve with practice helps, especially when things are hard, though less dramatically than the posters suggest. What makes the real difference is the practice itself: a book on the subject, a course, a mentor, a friend who's a few steps ahead. Each new skill makes the next step easier.
Feedback helps, but not all of it. Across hundreds of comparisons, it improved performance on average and made it worse in more than a third of cases, and the harmful kind tends to be about you, where the helpful kind is about the work. So ask about the task: "What would make the next draft better?" beats "How am I doing?"
When you slip
You will miss a day. When people built new daily habits, missing a single day made little difference to how quickly the habit stuck. What matters is what happens next.
Be kind to yourself about it. People who treated a failure with the understanding they'd show a friend were more likely to believe they could improve, and put in more effort afterwards, than people who were given a pep talk about how talented they were. A slip is information. Ask what got in the way, adjust your plan, and start again tomorrow, or at the next fresh start if you'd like a clean line under it.
The real conditioning
Wanting was always the easy part. Success conditioning, in the end, means setting things up so the next small step is obvious, and doing it often enough that it becomes who you are.
Take a leaf from Janus, the god who looks both ways: look back once at what got in the way last time, then forward to the next small step.
Pick one goal this week. Give it a number and a date, name the obstacle, decide when and where you'll act, and put a calendar on the fridge. February can look different this year.
Is a thought getting between you and the goal? How Changing Your Thoughts Changes Your Day — how to catch the thought that talks you out of it.
Want the goal to turn into a habit? The Real Reason Your Habits Never Stick — and Why It Has Nothing to Do With Willpower — what makes a new routine last.
Know someone whose goals start strong every January? Send them this before February does.
Disclaimer: This article is general information. For advice about your own health, talk to a qualified health professional.
Affiliate Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, All For Life earns from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you. We only link to products we would recommend without the commission.
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