Did you manage to keep your 2005 New Year’s resolutions? Didn’t think so. The majority of resolution-makers abandon their vows of personal or professional improvement by the time the calendar flips over to February, says Dr. Janet Polivy, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. Polivy has researched our commitment to resolutions and, she says, “We’re not very good at keeping them.”

And that goes for all resolutions. Whether it’s the coming New Year, the impending bathing-suit season or simply an on-the-spot promise to better ourselves, most of us have trouble committing to long-term change, she says.

According to Polivy’s research, the problem revolves around unrealistic expectations. Losing weight — easily the most popular resolution, particularly after the indulgent holiday season — is a prime example. Polivy’s team put 50 college students who wanted to lose weight on modest diets. After two weeks, all had managed to lose between one and two pounds, she says. That is considered a successful start down the path toward overall weight loss. But not according to the dieters, who had expected more dramatic results. “At the end of the two-week period, they had all abandoned the diets,” she says. “Every last one of them.”

Apparently, we want results, and we want them immediately. That is why we repeat the same patterns when it comes to most self-change resolutions, says Polivy. We commit to a plan and feel empowered by our decision, actually achieve some initial success and then we either hit a plateau or our program is simply untenable (no chocolate ever again?); our plan crashes and burns.

And it’s not as if we learn from our experiences. “The people who have too many false hopes are the ones who fail repeatedly but, interestingly, keep coming back to try again,” she says. In fact, resolutions get made and broken with such frequency that Polivy has coined a name for the repeat offender phenomenon: false hope syndrome.

Our naïve optimism — try, try again — would be almost comical but for the fact that it can lead to some pretty damaging feelings of failure and self-loathing.

Not everyone suffers from this, however. There are those, the minority, who stick with their resolutions until they achieve success. Polivy says these people aren’t doing anything spectacular but they are simply more realistic than their over-ambitious peers. “They go in with their eyes wide open,” she says. They recognize that a change actually involves changing, she adds: “If you want lasting change, you make lasting changes.”

These changes are never the quick-fix solutions into which the flourishing self-change industry wants you to buy, she adds.

Be realistic

Being realistic is indeed the key to reaching any sort of personal goal, says Derek Koehler, associate professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo. Koehler, who studies how people predict their own future behaviour, says his research suggests individuals put too much stock into their good intentions, ignoring other considerations that affect the chance of keeping a pledge.

Take the vow to improve our physical fitness. Although someone may have the good intention of hopping onto the treadmill every day, that is virtually meaningless, he says. Research demonstrates that our intentions have very little to do with what will eventually happen. Factors such as how much time the exercise program takes, where the treadmill is located and what music we can listen to or what we can read while we’re on the machine matter more than our good intentions, he says. Yet we continue to assume that if we want something badly enough, we will achieve it.

One general lesson that comes from this research is that those hoping to reach a goal need to be very specific in sketching out how it will come about, he says.

George Torok, an executive coach and consultant in Burlington, Ont., discourages the entire idea of resolution-making. “Resolutions seem too faddy to me,” he says. “People make them so quickly and they discard them just as quickly.”

He recommends that advisors sit down at least once a year and spend a day or so thinking about where they want to be in five years, setting any number of goals, personal and professional. These goals should then be broken down into baby steps, with check-in periods every 13 weeks. “Ninety-one days is a better time frame than 30 days because a month goes by really quickly,” Torok says.

@page_break@The 13-week time frame also provides a bit of breathing room when life gets in the way of the process, he adds. If, for example, we are training for a marathon, a one-week hiccup in which training just didn’t happen won’t mean the end of the program. This is important, he says, because these vows often get tossed aside if there is one bad week. Enter the false hope syndrome.

Torok also suggests goal-seekers use the Olympics as their model, setting three different achievement levels for the desired change. Each level should have a correlated reward. “There is nothing wrong with being ambitious,” he says. “But set that as the gold medal and back off to what’s realistic.”

The purpose of this strategy is to avoid repeating the set-and-fail pattern so many times that goal-making is put aside altogether.

“The plan doesn’t have to be perfect,” Torok adds. “Christopher Columbus didn’t have a perfect plan. Just have a plan.” IE