Henry Ford famously said, “Whether you think you can or you can’t, you are right.” His profound statement may explain the fantastically varied results of millions of New Year’s resolutions that Americans make each January. By summertime many of us have achieved our goals. Others have given up. And still a few of us muscle onward, clinging courageously to goals we have set but not yet met.
Jared Larrabee falls into the last category. Inspired by his younger brother, a cancer survivor who ran a 100-mile ultramarathon, Larrabee signed up last year for a 100-mile bike race in Houston, where he works as a management consultant for Deloitte. For months, the thirty-four-year-old father of two juggled early-morning workouts on top of a busy schedule, raised funds for charity, and solicited encouragement from friends and family to help him achieve his goal. By the book, he had done everything right leading up to race day.
Then Mother Nature interfered.
“When it got rained out, I emailed everyone who had donated and committed that I would find a different race,” Larrabee says.
Today he is more determined than ever to complete a century ride as he originally intended. This time, however, the wind is at his back. “I actually think you can draw strength from the negative experiences along the way as well as from the positive,” he adds.
Like Larrabee, those of us who make New Year’s resolutions never know what obstacles we may encounter on January 2. Thankfully, there are a host of resources to help us navigate unseen hurdles, from social networking sites and email reminders to life coaches and self-help books. Of course, experts agree that a few simple strategies are all one needs to keep that resolution made in January—all the way to the finish line.
Recipe for Success
Clinical psychologist John Norcross, a Distinguished University Fellow at the University of Scranton, says that 40 to 50 percent of adults in the United States participate in the age-old tradition of making New Year’s resolutions. Surprisingly, some 40 to 46 percent of the total are successful at six months, according to his research.
How do they do it? “One opinion might be to avoid the silver bullet or one-trick pony,” he says. “Some people say it just takes time. It just takes a buddy. It just takes willpower. In reality, it takes all of those things. People who are broad and systematic in their approach are much more successful.”
For starters, just making a resolution can improve your odds tenfold, he says. Studies have shown that New Year’s resolvers are ten times more likely to change a behavior than nonresolvers with identical goals and comparable motivation to change. In other words, committing to commit is the first big step.
In an essay called “The Resolution Solution,” Norcross offers a wealth of research-based tips for goal-setting and achievement, including the following preparatory steps:
- Make realistic, attainable goals.
- Develop a specific plan of action.
- Establish confidence in yourself to persevere, despite occasional slips.
- Publicly declare your resolution.
Once you’ve made your resolutions (or improved upon existing ones), begin cultivating social support, tracking your progress, and rewarding your successes. Norcross notes that most goals are health-related, such as losing weight, so it’s important to avoid high-risk environments, like candy shops.
And if you slip, don’t beat yourself up. In one study, nearly three in four participants said their first slip had actually strengthened their efforts.
“Think of resolutions as marathons, not 100-yard dashes,” Norcross writes. “Prepare for the long haul of a changed lifestyle.” That could take three to six months, he adds.
For those of us whose resolutions are, in fact, wellness-related, an online community called Traineo is just one of the many social networking sites that could help. Alasdair McLean-Foreman, founder of the Boston-based company, says the three-year-old web site has 200,000 users worldwide. These users can track their weight, record their exercise routines, and post photos of their progress. Most importantly, they can receive encouragement from like-minded individuals who share their goals. “You seem younger and a lot happier in the new picture,” writes one user to another.
And that’s just the tip of the internet iceberg. For making and keeping resolutions of all types, the online communities at LifeTango and Twitter provide active forums. For learning new skills (such as solving the Rubik’s Cube or dropping the word “like” from your vocabulary), wikiHow and eHow offer useful open-source and video tutorials. And for staying on track, resolutionsremind ers.com sends monthly emails to registered members. Even the U.S. government boasts some helpful content. By typing “resolutions” into the search field at USA.gov, patrons can access links to resources for popular New Year’s resolutions such as managing debt or volunteering to help others.
Looking Long-Term
Whatever they may be, our properly pursued goals can give us purpose and direction for the rest of our lives—if we simply start by writing them down. Just ask Aaron Shamy, whose eclectic to-do list helped him set a world record in speed climbing at the X Games in San Francisco. That list, which he created as a teenager, has grown from fifteen items to 222. It now hangs in his home office where he reviews it daily. “When I die, I’ll still have things in my in-box,” says the twenty-eight-year-old Utah native, “but the point is that there will always be things to push me to reach new levels.”
Beyond his gold medal at the X Games, Shamy has climbed the Matterhorn on the Swiss-Italian border, performed with Cirque du Soleil at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, and visited thirty-four countries. He has even appeared on the Showcase Showdown with Bob Barker on the game show The Price Is Right. On a more modest level, he has knit a scarf, sung a solo, and built a web site (which chronicles his four-year-old son’s battle with leukemia). To date, he has checked off half of the items on the list.
To inspire others to create their own lists, this entrepreneur and teacher shares his five-step formula:
- Decide what you want to achieve.
- Write it down. (That’s where most of us fail, he says.)
- Do it. Take action.
- Adjust as you go.
- Never give up.
Miles to Go
It has often been said that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. For 245-time marathon finisher John Bozung, a thousand miles was just the beginning.
To date, the fifty-six-year-old window installer from Orem has completed marathons on every continent and in every state. He has run a marathon every month for more than fourteen years. And four years ago at age fifty-two, he ran fifty-two marathons in a year, roughly one per week. “It might not be pretty,” he says of his slow-and-steady approach, “but I know I’ll get there if I just keep putting one foot in front of the other.”
Bozung, who grew up in Southern California, wasn’t always a long-distance runner. In high school he excelled in track but quit his cross-country team because he was opposed to the idea of having to run more than two miles. After he took a fifteen-year hiatus from running altogether, his brother-in-law challenged him to a six-mile race at a local Fourth of July celebration. Though he hadn’t run in years, he set a goal to finish in sixty minutes or less. He did it in fifty-six.
Buoyed by his accomplishment, Bozung then set his sights on the Los Angeles Marathon, which he ran in 1988, and completed seven other marathons in the five years that followed. When he turned forty in 1993, he ran all four major U.S. marathons—in Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, and New York—plus the St. George Marathon for added measure. Before he knew it, he was running marathons every month, and he has kept that string alive for 179 months.
“If you keep your eye on the goal,” he says, “you’ll get there. The people who have trouble are the ones who put too many obstacles in front of themselves.” For Bozung that often means breaking down larger goals into smaller ones. “Sometimes it’s not getting to the next mile,” he says, “It’s getting to the next telephone pole and then to the next telephone pole after that.”
That’s what helped him finish the Top of Utah Marathon in 2008, after face-planting three minutes into the race. Digging deep, he reminded himself that in 227 marathons, he had never quit. He finished in four hours, twenty-five minutes—and then received thirty-four stitches at the local emergency room.
Bozung says his running goals have helped him control his weight and overall health, meet new friends, and see new places. They’ve even helped him spend more quality time with his wife, who is also a runner. Currently he is on track to complete an ultramarathon (which are usually fifty to one hundred miles) in every state. He’s finished forty-five ultramarathons to date.
Though bad days still happen, he doesn’t quit: “You work with it, you deal with it, you adjust,” he says. “The important thing is to finish. No matter what’s thrown at you, you’ve just got to keep going.”
At a Library Near You. . .
A wealth of self-help books exist to assist goal-achievers. J. Wolsey Riggs, a Denver-based personal development counselor and the co-creator of the EASIER Method (Envision, Assess, Strategize, Implement, Evaluate, Report), offers the following list of titles for starters:
- A Theory of Goal Setting and Task Performance by Edwin A. Locke and Gary P. Latham, Prentice Hall Professional Technical Reference, 1990
- Goals! How to Get Everything You Want—Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible by Brian Tracy, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2004
- The Greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandino, Bantam Books, 1983
- Goal Setting: A Motivational Technique That Works! by Edwin A. Locke and Gary P. Latham, Prentice Hall Trade, 1984
- StrengthsFinder 2.0: A New and Updated Edition of the Online Test from Gallup's Now, Discover Your Strengths by Tom Rath, Publishers Group West, 2007
As the author Robert Kiyosaki put it, “Goals have to be clear, simple, and in writing. If they are not in writing and reviewed daily, they are not really goals. They are wishes.”
Maximizing the Process
To make goals more powerful, experts often use the SMART mnemonic to develop clear objectives. Janae Atencio, a management consultant with Booz Allen Hamilton in McLean, Virginia, says SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant (or realistic), and time-bound. Atencio, who earned her MBA from the Marriott School in 2003, teaches the method to executives and government workers who want to improve their leadership skills and productivity, but the application is universal, she says. Providing dates, times, and other specific information can help us reach our short- and long-term goals more effectively. Abraham Lincoln may have said it best: “A goal properly set is halfway reached.”
To put the SMART mnemonic into practice, let’s say Kate resolves to learn basic French before her next vacation to Paris, which is about six months away. With her long-term deadline firmly in place, she creates a list of short-term, actionable items she can accomplish daily, weekly, and monthly. She starts with a few preparatory goals, such as purchasing a multi-media language program and transferring the audio files to her mp3 player, enrolling in an introductory French class at the community college, and renting foreign films.
For her daily goal, Kate commits to ten minutes of audio practice in the car on the way to work and thirty minutes of study before bed. Weekly, she watches a French film with English subtitles. Monthly, she dines with advanced or native speakers at a nearby bistro. A Parisian friend checks in with her regularly using Skype or another web-based international calling network, while her professors at the community college monitor her progress closer to home. Of course, a picture of the Eiffel Tower on her dresser (next to her written goal) reminds Kate to adjust her program as needed and to persevere no matter what.
While this example is fictional, it illustrates how ordinary people have achieved extraordinary feats in record time. The key is to focus on the end goal, using smaller goals as stepping stones.
For Aaron Brown, that process is almost second nature. The twenty-six-year-old from Seattle has dreamed of opening his own restaurant since he was just a teenager—and he is well on his way, thanks to his current role as the head pastry chef at Sugar Daddy’s Bakery in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. There he prepares American-style cheesecakes, brownies, and cupcakes in the fashionable Jumeirah One neighborhood. He equates this goal to an umbrella with smaller goals inside of it.
To get started, Brown moved to New York City to enroll in the prestigious Institute of Culinary Education, renowned for its intensive, hands-on pastry program—a giant leap forward from the cinnamon rolls he often baked at home after skateboarding with friends all afternoon. “I wanted to spread my wings and stretch myself,” he says of the techniques of pastry art.
Though he excelled in school, the new graduate quickly found himself in over his head when he joined the kitchen staff at NYC’s Gramercy Tavern, where he had hoped to learn advanced techniques and master new equipment. “After my first week I went up to the roof of my apartment building and cried because I didn’t think I could do it,” Brown recalls. “A friend told me, ‘Stay there and work as hard as you can until they fire you. If they don’t fire you, you’re not hopeless.’” Brown stayed true to himself and to his goal. In two years he had risen to the rank of head cook.
But soon Brown felt stifled and in need of a mentor, so he sought out famed chef Alain Ducasse, whose multimillion-dollar empire was opening a new restaurant at the St. Regis Hotel. “The man’s brilliant, and I wanted to work for him,” Brown says. But after three months he was ready to take flight once more. It wasn’t long before he found himself on the other side of the world, one step closer to his dream.
Speaking through his Skype-enabled iPhone, Brown sounds tired and excited all at once. He admits to having worked one hundred consecutive days before taking his first day off from the bustling enterprise. “It’s been incredible,” he says. “This has helped me more than anything else to be able to open my own restaurant.”
Still driven by the goal he made ten years ago, the young expatriate is gaining the business acumen he needs to succeed where so many others have failed. His story could very well have inspired the American humorist Josh Billings to write, “Consider the postage stamp, my son. It secures success through its ability to stick to one thing till it gets there.”
Holistic Habits
In the Stephen Covey lexicon common to many executive coaching programs today, this concept of aligning missions, vision, values, and strategy from the beginning is known as “clear line of sight.” It’s knowing where your goals are coming from and where they’re taking you, says Eric Krueger, a Utah-based management consultant who has taught the principles of Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People for twenty-five years.
Of the habits, he says, four are necessary for meaningful personal change: be proactive, begin with the end in mind, put first things first, and sharpen the saw.
Sharpening the saw, or the concept of holistic self-renewal, is perhaps the most complex of all. According to basic tenets of organizational change, an unfulfilled need creates a basic desire to change. These unfulfilled needs may exist in four dimensions—the physical, the social/emotional, the mental, and the spiritual. The concept of sharpening the saw applies to all four of these dimensions, or needs.
“If you draw them as four circles that overlap, that space in the middle is ‘the light within,’ as Stephen Covey describes it. If you can do things that allow you to focus on the physical, social/emotional, mental, and spiritual needs, that’s where you really generate the light,” says Krueger, who earned his MOB from BYU in 1981.
Citing the commonality he has found among people throughout the world, Krueger notes that the least scientific of these planes—the spiritual—is just as universal as the others. “All people have a sense of spirituality,” he says. “They may not reflect it in terms of religion, but they reflect it in a desire to contribute and to leave a legacy.”
Maybe that’s why the goals we set as individuals often have the most power to elevate us as human beings—because they fulfill our most universal needs on multiple levels.
Whether it’s losing weight, learning to play an instrument, or being kinder to others, making and keeping personal resolutions can significantly improve the quality of our lives. The trick is to plan for the hurdles and never stop short of our goals.
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Article Written by Bremen Leak
Photography by Alisia Packard
About the author
Bremen Leak is a freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C. He earned his bachelor’s degree in journalism from Brigham Young University in 2005.
