Whether we’re talking about New Year’s resolutions or any other kind of resolution to change that people make throughout the year, statistics say that between 90 and 95 percent of people give up on them.
The good news is that the very fact that you’re thinking about dropping a toxic habit, adding a more productive habit to your life or simply changing something you don’t like about your life is a sign that, at some point, you’ve realised you need to make changes. You’ve become aware that something isn’t right, and you’ve felt the urge for things to get better. In other words, in some way you’ve felt the desire to thrive.
The bad news is that we focus on making things better, but we also know that procrastination, our lack of consistency with our resolutions, and discouragement when the effort outweighs the rewards will, at some point, make us want to give up on the change, and that the desire to move forward will end up crushed by complacency and by accepting our current situation, even if it isn’t the one we want.
(See: 6 reasons your New Year’s resolutions fail)
Some basics for understanding how motivation works in life
It doesn’t matter what you have. In fact, external things won’t make you happy in any consistent way. You can have a lot of money and it won’t guarantee happiness; you might even manage to start a relationship with the person you want, or land the job you dreamed of. The reality is that achieving something you wanted will only motivate you for a short period of time, until that motivation starts to fade on its own.
Motivation only keeps going if you keep growing
And this happens in every area. If you work for a company and have been doing the same thing for months or years, even though you have the peace of mind of a pay cheque at the end of the month and don’t feel stressed, monotony and boredom can set in, and there will come a point when going to work every day feels like a sacrifice.
You’ll spend your working days longing for Friday, and you’ll work all year longing for the holidays. The same happens in relationships. If monotony sets in, the relationship starts heading towards emotional failure.
So, as Tony Robbins often says, happiness is found only in progress. If you feel you’re making progress, your life always has meaning. There’s a reason to get up every morning. You feel you’re growing as a person. Every day you’re more than you were the day before. That’s happiness. Progress is consistent happiness.
Don’t make changes. Make progress
If in your head you think you have to make changes, those changes probably get associated with effort and sacrifice, so laziness is more likely to creep in.
Don’t focus on changing; focus only on making progress, and the change will happen automatically. You just have to take control of your progress. Let me explain this point: there are people who let themselves be carried along by life’s currents. They do what their means allow, work wherever they can, go out with whoever happens to be around, and so on. But after 10 or 20 years, those currents have taken them to what Robbins called life’s waterfalls.
That’s when they realise they’re heading straight for a waterfall, and that’s when they become aware they need to make changes, because they don’t like where the current has taken them. You could say that’s when the “race against the clock” resolutions appear.
Being aware of your progress means choosing which part of the river you want to swim towards, and certainly not letting yourself be swept along by the current, because you might not like where you end up. It means wanting to improve constantly, telling yourself: “I don’t like the people around me, I’ll find other surroundings”; “I don’t like my work situation, I’m going to progress professionally, I’m going to progress financially.” And all these words, once we turn them into actions, will end up bringing about changes in our lives. It’s a way of controlling progress, and therefore we’re very likely to control the outcome.
Don’t let it be just a wish
When most people set themselves a resolution, it isn’t really a resolution but a wish. They wish for something to happen, and when it doesn’t, they’re disappointed. The reality is that most of them weren’t really committed to their “wish”. You weren’t truly determined to bring about a change in your life.
It’s often said that a real decision is measured by the actions you take. If you want to do something but haven’t taken any action, it’s because you haven’t really decided. So it would only be a wish, and wishes, if no action is taken, rarely come true.
(See: 4 decisions that can change every area of your life)
You need a clear, conscious vision of what you want to achieve
One of the examples that best illustrates this point comes from Tony Robbins, who says:
Some people say they’re going to lose 10 kilos, quit smoking or stop eating sugar. When they say that, they aren’t really saying what they’re going to get out of it. They’re only saying what they’re not going to do.
Having a clear vision means picturing what you want to create. Not what you’re going to stop doing, but what you want to become. And that vision has to motivate you, because if the vision motivates you, every step of the process of change and progress will motivate you.
When you say you want to lose 10 kilos, it isn’t exciting or motivating. It probably won’t make you jump out of bed with enthusiasm at the thought of losing some weight. Some people talk about willpower, but willpower doesn’t last long. In fact, willpower on its own rarely works.
So we need to find another reason to jump out of bed, one that doesn’t require willpower: a vision so exciting that when things get tough (which at some point in the process they always do) we don’t give up and we keep going with the change.
And this is what’s called raising your standards
Don’t focus your effort on picturing the sacrifices you’ll make to lose weight. Focus your vision on the person you want to be: an attractive person, someone others like, a healthy person, the person you’ve always wanted to be. And it’s within your reach, because millions of people before you have done it.
Do the same for work, business and relationships. Don’t focus on what you want to have or what you want to leave behind. Focus on what you want to be. The rest of the changes come with it.
So we could sum up the process of change in these steps:
- Have a truly exciting vision.
- Have reasons strong enough to keep going.
- Review it and feel it every day.
The reticular activating system
Part of our brain uses the reticular activating system (RAS), which basically means our brain is able to focus on and notice whatever is important to us. And be careful, because this can work for you or against you.
In other words, if football is what matters to you, you’ll tend to surround yourself with other people who like football, and to listen to and join in conversations about football all the time. For your brain, football is important, so it will put all its senses into it. That’s why you never forget that there’s a Real Madrid–Barcelona match on such-and-such a day at such-and-such a time, yet you can easily forget some other event or date.
Can you imagine the power you’d have, and everything you could achieve, if your reticular activating system worked on one specific goal? You’d probably be unstoppable.
The RAS is the reason a student can’t manage to memorise 20 national capitals and 10 mountain ranges, yet that same student has effortlessly memorised the entire squads of four football teams, their tournaments, each player’s individual trophies, and so on.
That’s why, if you properly visualise a goal that fills you with real passion and enthusiasm and put all your efforts into it, your reticular activating system is very likely to work with you towards reaching that goal.
Swap “I should…” for “I must…”
I should change jobs, I should earn more money, I should learn about finance, I should do this or that…
We’ve all had plenty of “shoulds” throughout our lives, but I think that at some point we’ve also noticed how swapping a “should” for a “must” has changed everything dramatically.
Once again, “shoulds” can end up sounding like wishes. In fact, they are wishes, because we don’t usually take action to bring about the change. The moment you say “I must…”, it’s as if you were telling your brain there’s no other option and it has to focus on that.
For example, a woman stuck in a toxic relationship with an abuser has often said “I should leave him… I deserve better, I must get out of here.” And probably just when the situation seemed clearest, fears and doubts began to surface, and she even made excuses to herself to forgive that person.
That’s what “shoulds” tend to do: they open your mind for a moment, but if you don’t make the decision and focus on your vision, you can go back and settle in again.
When one day this woman says “I must…”, she has just said “enough is enough”, “not one more time”… That’s the moment she makes a decision, and there’s no turning back, whatever happens. In fact, once she’s made the decision, she doesn’t need willpower.
Now think about the areas of your life where you’ve spent years saying “I should do…” when you ought to be saying “I must…” by now.
We act according to who we believe we are
Numerous studies have confirmed that if a person believes they’ll never amount to anything, they themselves will bring about that result. It has been observed that simply changing the way a person dresses changes their attitude.
As we explained in a previous piece on the Pygmalion effect and learned helplessness, when the worst students in a class were led to believe they were geniuses with great potential, and people began treating them like geniuses, the moment they believed all that “song and dance” they ended up among the best students in the class.
The problem is that adults also condition ourselves easily. We believe we’re a certain kind of person, that we’re not very intelligent, that we have little creativity, and we end up acting according to those preconceived standards. That’s why we need to raise our standards.
Start acting not like the person you think you are, but like the person you want to be, and only then will you end up becoming that person. The “fake it till you make it” theory is right. Pretend you’re a confident person and act like one, and you’ll end up being a more confident person.
Act as if you were an entrepreneur or an investor. Surround yourself with those people, do what entrepreneurs and investors do, and it’s only a matter of time before you become one of them.
We act according to who we believe we are. We all have certain limits, but we don’t have as many limitations as we think we do.
Just by looking at you, I can tell what you do
When we see a man or a woman with toned, muscular arms, a lean body and low body fat, I don’t think anyone asks them: “Do you work out?” The answer is obvious, because the result is plain to see. They don’t exercise because they have that body; they have that body because they exercise.
The same happens when we see someone who comes from a poor family and has reached a certain financial status. Clearly that person has made certain decisions in life that other people haven’t.
When you see someone who has turned to alcohol and drugs, we know they’ve made certain decisions that led them to the life they have. Practically nothing happens by chance. We own our decisions, and therefore we’re responsible for shaping our destiny.
If you want to be like the muscular man at the gym, you’ll have to do the same as that man and go through the whole process he went through. If your decision is to surround yourself with people who lead a disastrous kind of life, it’s only a matter of time before your life ends up looking like theirs.
Once it’s clear to you that your actions define who you are, you’ll conclude that you can change who you are the moment you change your actions and make different decisions.
Wanting something doesn’t make you consistent. Raising your standards does give you that consistency, naturally.
(See: 7 things the world’s most successful people have in common)
See also: What you need to succeed: 3 things for wealth and massive success
The same goes for money and finances
Most people’s standard is to earn money to pay the bills and get by. If at some point things go wrong and financial challenges come along, they’ll either overcome them or not, but always with a great deal of effort.
For someone whose standard is working to live and pay the bills, any external change (the company closing down or a global economic crisis) can be one of their biggest headaches. And if for some reason a person loses what little they had, they could slide into depression.
The standards of successful entrepreneurs are very different. They aren’t defined by their money but by who they are. And this difference is why, if a multimillionaire loses everything or ends up 5,000 million dollars in debt (as was the case with Donald Trump), they barely worry.
Billionaire entrepreneurs know that money comes and goes. It isn’t what defines them. If they lose everything tomorrow, they don’t worry as much as a poor person would, because the rich person knows they did it once and will do it again. In fact, they already know how money is made. They just have to keep doing what they do best and keep behaving like who they are.
Remember the saying: “They can take away everything you have, but they can’t take away what you’ve become.”
Build new rituals
A person with a perfect body has different rituals from a person who is 80 kilos overweight. A person who is financially free has undoubtedly had, and still has, very different rituals from a person trapped in debt.
To raise your standards, you have to take different actions and turn those actions into daily habits. When the habit has taken hold and you do it naturally, that’s when you can say you have a ritual. And it’s the rituals you have that define who you are and who you’ll become.
For example, a ritual of drugs, alcohol and partying will take you to a very different place from that of a person whose rituals are reading, learning and exercise.
Success and failure
Tony Robbins often says that success and failure aren’t giant events. Quite the opposite. They don’t happen overnight, nor do they come from a single decision. They’re the sum of the decisions, habits and, above all, rituals we carry out every day. In fact, success comes to a person almost without them noticing, because it’s constant progress.
Small events happen every day, like not getting up early when the alarm goes off, which on its own doesn’t matter. We choose to watch TV instead of reading a book. We choose to go out partying every night instead of resting. They’re harmless actions, but put together over months and years, there comes a point when we look back and can say we failed in life, when in reality we’ve been taking actions that led us to certain failure.
On the other hand, small daily events such as learning new skills, gaining knowledge, making the most of our days and living more in line with the standards of people who have succeeded may or may not bring us success or get us to our goals, but at least we haven’t steered our life towards failure. In fact, it’s very rare for someone to feel they’ve failed in life if they feel that, even though they’ve fallen short several times, they keep moving forward.
To finish, remember this line from Tony Robbins: “People are rewarded in public for what they practice for years in private.”
Featured image: Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
