You don’t hear as much these days about New Years resolutions. Understandably. Most of the time they express wishful thinking about broad areas of life such as getting fitter or spending less time at work. I wonder though if the problem is not with the idea of New Years resolutions themselves, but in our apparent poor ability to turn the sentiment into reality. It is an impoverished world when we lose our desire to live better.

I recently heard Quentin Jones from Human Synergistics talk about their research into the foundations for high achievement management. Part of his analysis was that effective managers “believe in cause and effect.” To illustrate the point he described the opposite as believing in fate, chance or magic where there is little sense of control or influence over outcomes; we just keep living life as best we can and believe what will happen will happen. Contrary to this, effective managers know if that want ‘B’ then they have to do ‘A’ … and they do it.

Much of the future is determined by events out of our control, the suggestion is not that we can ‘achieve anything we want if we set our minds to it’ … my view is that this axiom denies the role that circumstances do play. What we are talking about here is the alignment of expressed desire and actual behaviour. There are two elements:

1. We appreciate the patterns of behaviour and activity that result in the desired outcome. For example, the salesperson knows that to close one deal, they need to make thirty prospect phonecalls, the IT manager knows that to reduce PC maintenance times they need to upgrade hardware every three years, or the father knows that if he wants to have a good relationship with his teenage kids he needs to eat dinner with his toddlers.

2. We then have to cultivate the disciplines that install the activities and behaviours. This is typically where it all comes unstuck. It is misguided to suggest our failure to achieve our goals springs entirely from the lack of desire. It regularly can be traced to our inability to develop break existing patterns of behaviour. There is extra ordinary comfort in staying with familiar activity and essentially ‘crossing our fingers’ hoping that we get a different outcome.

For example, we take it as a given that we have to have our email inboxes open all day, even when we acknowledge we need to be more focussed.  When we are familiar with avoiding difficult performance conversations, it is frightenly easy to continue to do so, effectively cultivating ongoing frustration, and there is significantly less resitance in getting up at 7am rather than 6am, even though we know the exercise we get in that hour generates more energy than the extra sleep.

So … lets not give up on New Years resolutions. More so, lets figure out what the activities are that will give us the most leverage toward our desired outcomes, and get whatever help we need to install them as daily habits.

If we keep doing what we’ve always done, we’ll get what we’ve always got.