What are your 2020 resolutions?

Whether you’re a go-getter or a no-getter, it’s safe to say we’re all getting inundated with resolution recommendations—get a plant, cook new recipes, do a workout challenge, do a book challenge, buy more, buy less—blah blah blah.

According to Ipsos, our main resolutions for 2020 reflect a desire for being healthier—in food, exercise, mindset and our relationships.

I know there's a lot of us that get all jazzed up starting a new year with a fresh outlook and recharged ambition, but then why do 80% of us fail at keeping our resolutions? Perhaps, the way we’re going about them is flawed. 

As reported by Fast Co, the top five reasons behavior change fails according to psychologists are as follows:

• We are motivated by negative emotions. 

• We get trapped in “all or nothing” thinking. 

• We start too big and too vague. 

• We forget that failure is a part of the process. 

• We don’t make a commitment. 

There is no silver bullet, but today we’re going to focus on how to create sticky behavior change—setting goals supported by daily habits. 

First, what is a goal? A goal is defined as "the object of a person's ambition or effort; an aim or desired result” whereas a resolution is “a firm decision to do or not to do something."

Experts say that the best goal is SMART—specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-limited. 

So if your resolution is to "read more", to make it a SMART goal, it could be something like "read 10 books in the next year." It would not be “read a book every day for the next year” because that’s likely unachievable unless you're some sort of speed-reading savant.

But, it shouldn’t stop there. A goal is only as good as the action plan you put in place. It’s great that you’ve decided to read 10 books in the next year, but without weaving it into your normal routine, will it actually happen?

This is where habits come in. Habits are neurological cycles made of up cues → routines → rewards. Cues are the triggers for your brain to launch a certain routine, which is the automatic habit that ensues. The reward is the benefit that cements the habit and creates a future craving, and a stronger habit for the future.

MIT researchers found that habits are created by the brain both for rewards and also efficiency. Habits become rote shortcuts that free up your brain to focus on tasks that require more mental energy.

Because habits are so ingrained in our brains and lives, they are difficult but achievable to change. The Power of Habit (a fantastic read), written by Charles Duhigg, posits that changing habits are not a quick fix and the formula is different for every person. And to create a new habit or change an old one, the most important thing to remember is that "a habit cannot be eradicated – it must, instead, be replaced."

So if I want to read 10 books in 2020, but I don’t have enough free time to do this, I should identify an area where I am wasting free time and re-engineer a bad habit into a good one. For example, mindlessly scrolling on Instagram. The cue for me doing this is when I’m watching TV on the couch. The reward for doing this is feeling stimulated. If I replace scrolling with reading, the hope is that the next time I’m on the couch watching TV, I might pick up a book instead.

This doesn’t just apply to our personal lives though, it also applies to advertising. Convincing someone to buy something different than they normally buy (and probably have been for years without thinking about it) or something completely new is a tall order. Duhigg cites a case study from Febreze where they realized they needed to reposition their product as an end of cleaning "reward" vs. a cleaning ritual in and of itself. Once they did this, their sales doubled within two months.

Who loves setting goals more than an enneagram 3? Businesses. 

Ideally, every employee in a company is working towards achieving goals that contribute to the vision of the company. The sad news is that per Achiever’s Workplace Employee report, 60% of employees don’t even know what their companies vision is.

Cue, goal setting systems! A wonderful business trend taking place around the country. One of the more popular goal-setting systems is OKRs or Objectives and Key Results, a "management methodology that helps to ensure that the company focuses efforts on the same important issues throughout the organization." 

It was introduced by Andy Grove in the 80s to Intel and subsequently to Google by John Doerr who further popularized it in 2018 in his book Measure What Matters.

Companies like LinkedIn, Twitter and Uber have implemented OKRs to help them motivate and activate their tens of thousands of employees. They are similar to SMART goals with specific objectives and measurable results with a timeline. In addition to that, OKRs have created a system to apply it to a whole company from top to bottom and side to side.

Here's an example of a marketing OKR (this site is a great resource BTW):

Other popular goal-setting systems that have cropped up are EOS and Scaling Up, which have some similarities to OKRs but are more geared toward entrepreneurs and startups.

The question that remains is if goals and all of these systems actually work?

Yes and yes. Researcher Edwin Locke has studied the impact of goals for the past 30 years and found that specific and challenging goals led to higher performance (vs vague goals or no goals at all) in 90% of his studies.

Larry Page, the former CEO of Alphabet and co-founder of Google says OKRs contributed to 10x growth, helping "make our crazily bold mission of 'organizing the world’s information' perhaps even achievable."

What does this all mean? Whether you're trying to change your own behavior, an audience's behavior or your company's behavior, consider the mechanics of goal-setting and how you can re-engineer them for a more powerful outcome. And if you have already quit dry January, I don't blame you.