Patience: How to Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions

New Year, New Goals, Same Results

We all know the rush of excitement that comes at the turn of a year. The celebrations are invigorating and fill us with fresh motivation, the vision of endless possibilities, and imaginations for the future. We all innately have a desire to grow and improve our lives, to learn new skills and venture out of our comfort zones and experience the fullness of life. But often our plans do not convert to these new lives we desire. The new habits that goals require are significant, and the initial momentum can lead us to plan lofty and rarely achievable methods of implementation. As a result, we quickly become discouraged, lose motivation, and stop trying. In fact, one study found that only 10% of people who set New Year’s resolutions actually keep them. Why is achieving goals so hard?

What is keeping us from achieving the goals that we so genuinely want to implement?

One reason is because the mental energy new habits require is extremely taxing, on top of our already full lives. As adults, our patterns of behaviors are considerably more entrenched than children and youths, who are still developing habits and forming their values, and our mindsets are less pliable. Creating new habits is HARD WORK. Our intentions and desires to improve our lives are so honorable and earnest, but proper execution evades us. Those entrenched routines and mindsets make it difficult to incorporate new patterns necessary for reaching our goals. 

From a practical, science-based perspective, there are strategies we can utilize to lift some of the daily mental load that change requires. According to author of Atomic Habits, James Clear, there are four “laws” that can help us change our habits.

• Make the desired habit obvious and the undesired habit invisible. 
• Make the desired habit attractive and the undesired habit unattractive.
• Make the desired habit easy and the undesired habit difficult.
• Make the desired habit satisfying and the undesired habit unsatisfying.

These strategies make so much sense. However, if achieving our goals with new habits was this simple, that 9% statistic would be much higher. The missing component in these outward behavioral strategies is that they need to be partnered with our inward values, such as purpose and how we make meaning, and virtues, especially patience, to activate and align with our intrinsic motivations, which will be the sustaining force in our efforts for change. 

Patience is an oft forgotten virtue in today’s culture. An overwhelming amount of our daily touchpoints are easily met with instant gratification. When we can get what we want, whenever we want, there is little motivation or even opportunity to practice patience. Yet without patience, we can rob life of the opportunity to shape us in ways that only happen over time. 

Why does patience help us achieve our goals?

Patience takes many forms—allowing room for failure, speaking kindly to ourselves to get back on track, and knowing the journey will take longer than we want. It infuses us with stamina and resilience to become who we want to be in a way that does not fear failure or give up when we don’t see progress on our desired timeline. As we cultivate patience, we recognize that we are all inwardly in a continual process of adapting to life’s changes and revising the goals we have for ourselves as we are exposed to new information and experiences. We can manage our expectations and shift our image of “failing” at a goal. It gives us endurance to not lose hope for who we hope to become in the future, and the space to sit in gratitude for who we have become already. 

How do we cultivate patience for the journey to our goals? 

Our outward behavioral goals are often an attempt to live into a deeper inward value or virtue. Living a more full expression of that value or virtue takes much longer than does the time frame we would place on a typical behavior-based goal, and is much more about who we are becoming over what we are doing. If we adopt this mindset, we can relax into who we are and trust that although the process is almost imperceptible compared to a written list, it robustly and permanently changes our souls. 

Acknowledging the process produces this type of patience, as we recognize in advance that the road could be longer than we’d like and that we will certainly encounter failure, but that, ultimately, no matter the goal, cultivating more patience in our lives improves the quality of the journey, which might even end up being our favorite part. 

When we acknowledge that goal-setting stems from our desire to become the best version of ourselves, the methods of getting there become less rigid and the appearance of failure simply becomes an opportunity to try something new or abandon a goal altogether—maybe it wasn’t meant for us. 

We can find acknowledgement through mindfulness practices that help us sit with our thoughts and examine where we have been too rigid and where we can practice patience. 

Practice:

In this mindfulness practice, let’s identify a particular goal and walk through our mindset, noticing our points of frustration and considering how we can practice more patience. 

• Bring to mind a goal that is important to you. Why is it important?
• Imagine yourself on the journey to this goal, doing your best to implement your strategies. Then, you experience a setback. Envision what your reaction might be (discouragement, frustration, shame, disappointment, anger, defeat). Think about what your body would feel as you experience this response (tense, heavy, a pit in your stomach, headache, tears).
• Now, imagine applying a patient response to this setback. How would you like to see yourself respond (with love, self-acceptance, acknowledgement, perseverance, gratitude)? Perhaps consider how you would counsel someone else to respond. 
• Picture yourself responding with patience. How can this goal be reframed and seen within the context of who you are and want to become?
• What do you feel in your body as you initiate this response (peace, relaxation, lightheartedness, relief)?
• Fully embrace this moment, and allow it to be a practice to revisit in the future when you are thinking of implementing new goals.

Further reading:

Atomic Habits by James Clear

WAIT: Understanding and Practicing Patience

References:

Norcross, John & Mrykalo, Marci & Blagys, Matthew. (2002). Auld Lang Syne: Success Predictors, Change Processes, and Self-Reported Outcomes of New Year’s Resolvers and Nonresolvers. Journal of clinical psychology. 58. 397-405. 10.1002/jclp.1151.