The new year is filled with hopes and aspirations. We will finally get fit, lose weight, learn something new, spend more time with family, save money, spend less, eat healthier, or some other “new year, new me” cliché. This then begs the question, if we all have these goals (which makes them no less worthy) why do so many of us fail. The short answer is because nothing systemically changes in a sustainable way.
Sure, our effort changes after a couple months of guilt tripping, followed by a moment of self-acceptance which leads us to forget about our goals until August when we are already over halfway through the year. This “sprint” style of behavior change is not a sustainable path to change when we are running a marathon. There is nothing to hold us accountable after we get tired, lose motivation or we have made “good enough” progress. In this article I am going to outline 5 methods to help increase your chances of reaching your goals in 2026.
Start Small
You know what’s better than no pushups per day? 1 push up per day. We often put an immense amount of pressure on ourselves to be a completely different person one month from now and as a result we try to set a habit or routine that we have no intention of maintaining once we hit our goal. Then we are shocked that once we stop the routine, all our progress magically goes away. This is also why having a “why” is helpful. If you are changing for some vanity reason because you want praise or adoration from your peers. Then you are going to revert to old habits when you realize that no one cares about your progress as much as you do. However, if you change for yourself, you don’t need approval from others and you are more likely to find habits or routines that you enjoy and are more likely to stick with.
Don’t Be Alone
Is the excuse you give yourself for justifying a cheat day an excuse that your partner or friend would agree with? Sometimes yes but more often no. Having an accountability buddy can help pick up the slack when you begin to lose motivation. In the book “Triggers” by Marshall Goldsmith, the author uses an example where this woman is on a juice cleanse but gives herself a three-day hiatus for a friend’s wedding. She then checks in with her uncle, and he agrees with her reasoning that she doesn’t want to be the only one drinking smoothies while the rest of her friends are out to eat and may have to eat from a set menu. She then tacks her three-day hiatus at the end of her juice cleanse to “make up for lost time”. Sometimes you may have a valid reason to take a break. However, it is more often that the excuses you make for yourself will not be deemed valid by other people and having someone to check in with can help clear up this gray area.
Active Questions Instead of Passive Questions
In the event you don’t have someone to talk to about your routines and goals. Here is a simple trick you can tack on at the end of the day to assess yourself. We often treat effort as if it is a “second-class citizen” and view things in absolute terms. “I succeeded” or “I failed”, “I am fat” or “I am skinny”. This black and white thinking (dichotomous thinking) is a normal thought process but when done in excess can ultimately be harmful. Here is the habit: Ask yourself if you tried to make progress today. Did I try to eat healthy? Did I try to be active? Did I try to spend time with my family today? These active questions are significantly more effective because you play an active role in the process. As opposed to passive questions which revolve around success or failure. For example, let’s say I want to be a more active person, and I have this aspirational goal of going to the gym for 30 minutes, 7 days a week. Then let’s say that I have a day that gets completely derailed. I sleep in, miss my alarm, work runs over, I need to go grocery shopping because I forgot the previous day. Whatever it may be and I end up not going to the gym. A passive question would be “Did I go to the gym today?”, to which the answer would be “no” and now I feel guilty on top of having a bad day. An active question would be “Did I try to be active today?” to which the answer could be “I didn’t go to the gym, but I did go for a walk on my lunchbreak so yes I tried to be more active”. This difference in framing successes or failure helps make you feel as though you are an active participant in your goals as opposed to being shackled to a habit you begin to resent. Feel free to rank your effort on a scale from 1-10 for even better results.
Rewards and Punishments
Often we view our goals as restrictive instead of additive, and there are times where this is the point behind some goals. “I will eat less sugar” by definition, is restricting an aspect of your life. Even “I will go to the gym more” may seem additive, because you are increasing a behavior, but even this can feel restrictive because it restricts the time you can spend on other tasks. If you don’t replace the behavior with something that is desirable, then you are left with this energy void, and you will go back to what is familiar. This is where you must reward yourself for each small step and acknowledge the consequences that are the result of the current habit. Every behavior has a reward and a consequence. Getting that Starbucks latte tastes amazing (reward) and if you drink them to the point where you are in a caloric surplus you will begin to gain weight (consequence). Then you can go to the gym (which may be a reward or punishment depending on who you are) and then you feel better and burn off those calories (reward). This is also where personal boundaries can help substantially. “If I go get Starbucks, I then have to go to the gym” is a great way to help you challenge if you really want to get that Starbucks. Sometimes you will take that tradeoff and other times you may want to skip the gym so you skip Starbucks.
Beware of Inertia
Inertia is defined as “the natural tendency of an object to resist changes in it’s state of motion”. Have you ever said, “I’ll watch five TikTok’s as a wind down” and it is suddenly 3am? Some behaviors have an almost inertial quality to them where they are harder to stop than they are to start. Social media, TV, eating junk food, staying up too late, and video games can all fall into this category. However, there are also behaviors that are self-terminating. Meaning that they require sustained effort, or attention, to remain engaged. Working out, learning a language, forcing yourself to eat carrots instead of chips, and exercising self-control all fall into this category. In “Atomic Habits” by James Clear, this is where the concept of “make the good things easier and the bad things harder” comes from. For some of us, some things will be more desirable than others. One person may love going to the gym, whereas another person may be content with a calm walk outside. One person may never touch sugar but goes through a whole bag of chips in one sitting. It just depends on what your preferences are, and this doesn’t mean that anyone is better or worse than you because they like or dislike a specific behavior. It just means you must build this awareness of what behaviors you are more or less likely to engage in and how do those behaviors align with your goals.
Now, these are a few methods that you can use to help improve your chances. However, ultimately the work comes down to you and your willingness to try, fail, try again, and fail again. You have to be willing to be malleable so that you can find what works for you. What works for you, may not work for another person. We become attached to the goals we set whereas the trend line is the most important thing. We all have this perfect ideal of who we “want to be” and this leads to us not accepting ourselves for who we are. It can be hard, but there is a paradoxical problem of if you don’t accept who you are, you can’t change who you are and you will live in confusion or denial trying to figure that out. You have to be willing to face the person in the mirror and be brave enough to say “I see who I am and I am not who I want to be”. This is where growth occurs and the important thing to keep in mind is that every step counts and you are not alone.
Citations
Goggins, D. (2018). Can't hurt me: Master your mind and defy the odds. Lioncrest Publishing.
Goldsmith, M., & Reiter, M. (2015). Triggers: Creating behavior that lasts—Becoming the person you want to be. Crown Business.
Clear, James. (2018). Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. New York: Avery.