Happy New Year. I’m braced for LinkedIn posts drawing cringeworthy parallels between a new habit and career success. ‘The gym is a metaphor for life. It teaches me about overcoming adversity and never giving up.’
These painful posts won’t be around for long because most new year’s resolutions are ditched by February.
Even if we do a thorough job on our goals – breaking them down into component parts with mini deadlines, finding a buddy, making them SMART, hairy, whatever – our enthusiasm will be short lived. Strava analysed millions of user activities to pinpoint a specific date when most people are likely to give up. Quitters Day is the second Friday of January. Just one week away.
Here’s some reasons why we quit:
Our goals are setting us up for failure (we are so single minded on a perfect process to the target that we give up on the first wobble, ending up even more disgruntled)
They are too vague (‘do more networking’)
Too binary, all or nothing (I’ve broken dry January so I might as well finish the bottle)
They are outside our control (someone else is making the selection decision)
We didn’t really want to do it anyway so can’t be arsed to keep it up (30-second cold shower for 60 days)
What’s a better intention for 2026?
Stop worrying about things you can’t control, show up confidently and find fun in the everyday.
I frequently get a sense from clients that they are getting through each day, working towards some unforeseen future date when everything will be ok – when they’ve cleared this, studied that, achieved this, done that. They spend their lives clearing the decks, always preparing rather than doing the thing now.
Working in a crazy busy and joyless way is not a penance on the pathway to peace of mind. It makes us more overwhelmed and anxious, less effective. We are fixated with a future we can’t control, perhaps ignoring golden opportunities under our nose.
Of course, I’m an advocate for more strategic planning and looking at what’s coming over the hill, not being down in the weeds. That’s not the same thing as worrying constantly about a frightening future. Life is finite, there are no pockets in a shroud. As Oliver Burkeman says beautifully in Meditations for Mortals ‘we have to show up as fully as possible here, in the swim of things as they are.’
This year, take your role seriously, but choose to make life easier and find those precious daily pockets of fun.
Here’s my cheat’s solution to achieving all your goals in 2026 in one switch:
Decide who you want to be
Start behaving like that person
Taken from Richie Norton’s Anti-Time Management. Think about what a perfect week would look like to achieve your goals, then figure out what steals your time and eyeballs from making it happen. Warren Buffett’s advice is to make a list of 30 things you want to do, prioritise the top five, then delete all the other 25 things, because they are just distractions.
Here’s my Einstein animation to remind us that we control time.
Happy New Year. I speak and coach. I have availability for talks and workshops around International Women’s Day on 8 March and I’m taking bookings for Canada in May, and everywhere else any time. Talk soon and take care
Warm wishes
Zena