The holidays and New Year are upon us and for many it’s a time of refection and resolution. While I’m a big fan of creating intentions and change, there are aspects about the act of creating resolutions that began to feel questionable to me a few years ago. An interesting thing though – since I stopped creating them, I’ve actually achieved more of my goals. Here’s why:

First of all, the “energy” around resolutions is a negative one. The belief behind creating resolutions suggests that we have to change or “solve” something in our lives because what we’ve been doing thus far hasn’t been working, that we aren’t good enough, and in order to “get where we want” in life, (suggesting it’s all about getting somewhere) we must commit to a “stepping up” of sorts. We need to be “fixed.”

While I do support creating change in ones life, there’s a tacit pressure attached to resolutions, which suggests that if we can’t successfully stick with our commitments, that we’ve screwed up – that in effect, we are screw ups. If we fail, we’re knowingly setting ourselves up to berate ourselves for not being good enough, strong enough, or resilient enough. So before we even begin to make efforts to attain our goals, there’s often a feeling of struggle or unlikelihood in fulfilling our resolutions.

“This time it will be different,” we say to ourselves, in regards to achieving our goals, but it rarely is. And we can’t understand why we’ve yet again failed.

Why is it that we commonly fail when our desire for change is so strong? The reason is clear and simple. We can rarely create change simply because we “resolve” to. Behind every unhealthy or undesirable action there is a habit – an unconscious belief that drives us.

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