If you are making a New Year’s resolution you would like to keep, consider the example of Charlene Zatloukal.
A year ago, the Lincoln, Neb., artist and writer was so disorganized that she spent much of her time looking for misplaced supplies in her office clutter. To find all the Web sites where she had posted her artwork, “I often had to Google my own name,” she says. But she made a resolution last New Year’s Day to get organized, and now, a year later, she is sticking to it. With the clutter gone and her deadlines and routines under control, she says, “my life is so much easier.
‘I had to give myself time to achieve my goal step by step. If I had tried to change everything at once, I would have set myself up for failure.’
It is no secret that the odds against keeping a New Year’s resolution are steep. Only about 19% of people who make them actually stick to their vows for two years, according to research led by John Norcross, a psychology professor at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania.
But those discouraging statistics mask an important truth: The simple act of making a New Year’s resolution sharply improves your chances of accomplishing a positive change—by a factor of 10. Among those people who make resolutions in a typical year, 46% keep them for at least six months. That compares with only 4% of a comparable group of people who wanted to make specific changes and thought about doing so, but stopped short of making an actual resolution, says a 2002 study of 282 people, led by Dr. Norcross and published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology.
To explore what separates the winners from the losers, I tracked down several people who have kept their resolutions for a while. In addition to Ms. Zatloukal, Michael Haenel, a Phoenix, Ariz., commercial real-estate broker, has for more than a year kept a vow to practice a daily ritual of writing down and reflecting on three things for which he is grateful. Cristina Barcia, a Melville, N.Y., paralegal, has kept for several weeks a pre-holiday resolution to take off a few pounds. And Mark McGuinness, a London coach and trainer, has kept for two years his New Year’s 2008 resolution to meditate every day.
Their stories illustrate several rules for success. Contrary to popular belief, the secret isn’t willpower, Dr. Norcross says; people who rely on hopes, wishes or desire actually fail at a higher rate than others. Instead, the successful resolution-keepers made specific, concrete action plans to change their daily behavior.