WHY YOU SHOULDN’T BOTHER MAKING NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS!

New Year’s resolutions are as old as time, but that doesn’t mean they’re very effective.

About billions usually make New Year’s resolutions, and another 50 million sometimes do, according to research by the University of Michigan.

The same research says most can of us stick it out a few weeks, but after six months fewer than half are still going. Only 8% of us are actually successful. Some industries even count on us giving up. Fitness centers, for instance, sell year-long contracts knowing most of us won’t actually show up more than a few times. Their business model depends on most members getting distracted, overwhelmed, or uninterested.

This is about much more than numbers, of course. It’s about people’s dreams. Most New Year’s resolutions are about health, wealth, relationships, or personal development. In other words, they’re about the kind of things that matter most to us.

I’m sure you have your own personal stories of starting the New Year strong only to get busy, fall behind, and eventually lose motivation. It’s happened to me. And it’s exactly why I don’t bother making New Year’s resolutions anymore, at least not the usual kind.

How to make resolutions that really stick

Some dreams are just too important to entrust to a faulty system. Instead, I utilize a proven goal-setting process that incorporates safeguards for many of the things that cause typical resolutions to fail. It’s taken me years to develop this process, and I’ve seen it work not only in my own life, but also in the lives of countless people with whom I’ve shared it.

Some people will say that the best way to make our resolutions stick is to only pick one or two for the year. But that’s leaving too much on the table for me, and probably a lot of you too. We’re talking about the things that matter most, right? Why leave so many things undone and miss so many opportunities to grow? Instead of cutting back, we just need to bone up on a system that actually works.

Life’s too short for typical New Year’s resolutions that are almost guaranteed to fail. It’s time to make progress toward the things that matter most.

WHAT I'VE LEARNED FROM THIS YEAR’S FAILURES

People often look at my success and assume I haven’t had any failures. Excuse me while I laugh. Have you seen my recent blooper reel?

The truth is that I have experienced plenty of failure, and many are a lot worse than a flubbed line. I just don’t usually publicize them.

Here are three failures, just from this year:

1- Batch releasing my posts - I thought people would love this. They could binge-listen to my show, just like Netflix, right? As it turns out, not so much. Yes, I had a few hundred fans do this, but it’s barely worth the effort. I doubt it is something I will continue.

2- Best Year Ever launch video - I use one of the best video app on the planet. But sometimes you have no time to launch video for 10 days or more. Just the same with my posts.

3- Best Year Ever Leaders Edition - My overall launch has been hugely successful. I literally have doubled my services from last year. However, one piece never got off the ground at all.

I shot three videos for a special Leaders Edition, but I wasn’t happy with the results, so I scrapped them. I then rebuilt the entire course from the ground up, but I still wasn’t happy with the final product, so I scrapped that, too.

Then were dozens of other mistakes, too, most of which I recovered from. But still, across the board, these mistakes represented a significant negative impact on my business - not only in expense and burden on my team, but also in lost revenue.

If you’ve ever had a product slip or not ship at all, you know what a massive face-palm it can be. But still, in spite of these failures - or maybe because of them - I've managed to double my revenues and profit for the year.

But while failure, mistakes, and bloopers are inevitable for all of us, we can choose to respond in ways that help us on the road to success. Here are six steps for making sure your failures move you forward.

1- Acknowledge the failure - There’s no point avoiding the obvious. The first step for processing failure is to admit our initiative, product, or promotion just didn’t work. We have to be willing to say, “Now that was a failure”. Rather than defending it, there’s enormous freedom in simply declaring it.

2- Take responsibility for it - More then merely acknowledging it, we need to own up to our part in the failure. Blaming outside forces, including other people, might cushion the blow to our ego, but it won’t let us get beyond what went wrong or what was missing. More importantly, it won’t move us forward.

3- Mourn it (if necessary) - Some mistakes are simple things we can blow off - like thirty-seven takes on a simple video. (I’m not making that up.) But others are major emotional letdowns. There’s nothing wrong with being real in the midst of a disappointment. Grieving is often a natural part of helping us get beyond a setback.

4- Learn from it - Once we’ve faced our failures for what they are, we can begin to analyze them for what went wrong and why. There’s learning in the middle of every letdown. For example, I’ve gone over the Leaders Edition failure in my head a dozen times and now see several things I will do differently next year. I can hardly wait to get started!

5- Adjust your behavior - Learning leads to action. Whether it’s retrying a video take in a different way or reworking a major product, once we learn from our mistakes we can act in ways that minimize or even leapfrog those problems going forward. In this sense failure always serves to make us better - if we allow it.

6- Enter into the next project - Failure is part of life. But so is success. It just takes working through our setbacks and staying on the path. A process like this can reframe our failures so we see them as practice - and even the vital preparation - for success. So what are you waiting for? Like I say in the blooper reel, a lot, “Let’s try that again”.

Failure is inevitable, but we can choose to respond in ways that accelerate our journey to success. In other words, if at first you don’t succeed … you’re normal. But - and this is big - we don’t have to be defined by our failures. We can work through them, get past them, and let them fuel our eventual success.

What setbacks have you experienced recently and what have you learned from them?