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New Year’s Resolution #1: No More Resolutions!

If you have ever poured your mind, body and soul into creating and implementing New Year’s resolutions, chances are good you won’t be doing that again soon. New Year’s resolutions are notorious for producing more frustration than personal growth; because of this, many therapists suggest alternative methods for moving to higher ground.

“My advice regarding New Year’s resolutions,” says Judith Brodie, a Denver, Colorado based therapist, “is to not make them!” In her work with troubled teens and their parents, Brodie has worked with clients who were desperate to make dramatic changes, but exasperated by failed attempts.

Despite Brodie’s dismissive approach toward resolutions, she is a champion of process-oriented personal growth. “I’m a proponent of process,” says Brodie, “of figuring out what we’re ready for, what we want, what we need, and then taking small steady steps in that direction. Jumps, dives, and resolutions, in my experience, are hard for people to sustain.” Whether the issue involves an eating disorder, social anxiety, alcohol abuse or exercise, attempts at dramatic change can lead to failure, frustration, and depression.

Psychologist Robert Maurer, a professor in UCLA’s Family Medicine Department, agrees with Brodie. “The average American makes the same New Year’s resolution seven years in row before giving up,” he says, “this is hardly a practical solution to us wanting to better our lives.” In his new book, One Small Step Can Change Your Life, Maurer applies the Japanese philosophy of Kaizen-or continuous improvement through micro changes-to therapeutic healing. Instead of creating frustration and failure by attempting immediate large-scale change, Maurer suggests easing into change. “My suggestion is to take an area of life you’d like to improve and identify an activity in that area you’d like to be doing. Engage in this activity for just one minute a day, four, five or six days per week to start.”

In One Small Step Can Change Your Life, Maurer tells the story of a patient who had failed repeatedly at her attempts to stick with an exercise program. Her resistance to exercise was so great that he had her just stand on her treadmill for a minute a day where she would drink her first cup of coffee and read the paper. Before long, Maurer reports, standing led to walking a little and walking a little led to walking more and more. Small steps, Maurer contends, circumnavigate our natural, neurologically based resistance to radical change, clearing the path for a process of incremental, often life changing, improvement.

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” Maurer reminds us, “and research suggests that those steps need to be as small as possible to make the giant leaps we all want in our lives.”

San Francisco-based family therapist Drew Krafcik suggests that there is some preliminary work to be done before we even select these areas of incremental change. “Understanding why we choose to make a New Year’s resolution is much more important than the resolution itself. If we don’t fully understand why we’ve started something, how could we expect to understand why we might quit?” Krafcik suggests starting with a broad view of what we want to change in our lives and becoming clear about our motives, visions, and fears before engaging in the change process. The implication for parents of struggling teens is that a combination of clear communication and patience are called for when engaging your child in areas of concern.

So this New Year, it might be good to stick to one resolution: “no resolutions!” Instead, come up with a New Year’s vision-a broad-strokes image of what you want your life to look like over the next few years. Revisit this vision frequently or post it in a highly visible location-over your desk, on your bathroom mirror-and use it as a rubric to evaluate the small decisions you make on a daily and weekly basis. Constantly ask, “is this small decision leading me toward, or away from, my vision of who I want to become?” You might pick one or two specific activities that support this personal vision and start by folding just one minute’s worth of that activity into your schedule several days each week.

This small step might be the start of your own thousand mile journey as one minute becomes two minutes, two becomes three, and before long what was once an impossible frustration becomes an easy, happy habit. As the parent of a troubled teen, actions are often more powerful than words-show her by your own humble actions this year that a patient process can yield positive changes.