Make Specific Resolutions This Year
You can’t travel far in the first few days of any new year without happening on a story on the top resolutions folks have made: Lose weight, get organized, spend less save more. And you can’t travel much beyond that without tripping on a story on how to actually keep these promises. Some of the advice (like writing things down, which seems to work in just about every category) is quite good, but most of it isn’t new.
That’s why the piece on The If-Then Solution in the brand new issue of Psychology Today was such a grabber. It posits that resolutions aren’t maintainable when they’re just about doing something – eating less, spending less, yelling less. Because they’re so big, so all encompassing, those big resolutions are tough to keep for a day or a week, let alone a whole year.
What resolutions need to work is specificity. Rather than just make a blanket resolution, the idea is to tell yourself that if X happens, then you will do Y. If I walk past my favorite store and see something tempting in the window, I will admire it but I will not go in. If I am making my kids an early dinner, I will wait to eat with my husband and I will not nibble off their plates. Having an If-Then plan increases your chances of sticking to your guns by two to three times, according to the PT piece.
I think they’d increase mine even more in the form of a when-then plan than an if-then plan. Your if shouldn’t be something that can happen occasionally, it should be something you know happens all the time. Perhaps you’re trying not to smoke and you know that you always want to light up after your first martini. That’s the perfect place to use a When-Then plan, as in, when I down the last few drops of my first martini, then I will order a club soda and lime to keep my mouth busy. It not only gives you something to think about so you don’t reach for your cigarettes, it gives you something to do.
Have you ever tried a when-then plan? Love to hear how it’s working out.
