Why Your New Year's Goals Keep Failing
How is that for an encouraging title? Don't worry, I have three great tips to help you overcome the problems you keep facing with your New Year's Resolutions...including your 2025 Word of the Year.
New Year’s Resolutions don’t work for most people.
In 2024, between 30-50% of Americans made a resolution.1 The most common resolutions revolve around health, weight, or some other form of personal improvement. As I’m sure you know (and probably have experienced), only 25% of Americans stick with their resolution for more than a month and less that 10% follow through all year.2
These aren’t new stats. You’ve heard them. You’ve lived them.
As much as I hate to admit it, I guess the statistics would be similar for a Word of the Year project. When people were polled about why they didn’t keep their New Year’s Resolutions, the top three reasons were:
Losing motivation (35%)
Being too busy (19%)
Shift in goals and priorities (18%)3
Again, these are personally familiar for the years when I didn’t see the growth I hoped for with Word of the Year. I shared one of the most critical lessons in my fifteen years of practice last week—WHY The Word of the Year project works: intentionality.
INTENTIONALITY
You change, grow, or improve because you take intentional steps toward growth. This is true for successful goals and resolutions and for the Word of the Year. If you want to grow from your Word of the Year, you must take intentional steps to succeed.
In past posts, I’ve shared some initial steps. They include:
Share with someone in person.
Share online.
Make your word prevalent.
These are great to start, but they don’t speak to how you learn and grow from your Word throughout the year. In this post, I will share three steps I’ve used over the past few years to grow from my Word of the Year. And, if you continue reading to the end of the post, I am offering a free tool to kick-start your 2025 Word of the Year into gear!
1. Time + Space
I am a disciplined person. To be honest, I don’t want to be regimented, but I’ve found that I can’t make progress in my life without discipline. It’s all or nothing for me. To this end, several years ago, I began waking up a little earlier each workday morning for prayer, reading, and meditation.
Initially, I would stay in bed, but inevitably, I would fall back asleep or disturb my wife, who was still sleeping. This led me to get out of bed and head into our kitchen (as opposed to our living room, where the temptation to sleep remains) to sit and read.
The side benefit to this practice is I have a specific time and space to contemplate my Word of the Year. You need this time and space, too. It doesn’t need to be early in the morning, at home, or every day. It just needs to be a regular slice of time where you can be quiet and think.
I won’t lie. This is so much easier now that my children are (mostly) grown. At most, I will pop my head into a bedroom to wake up a sleeping teen for school. I’m not changing diapers, making lunches, or brushing hair. Even then, the potential was available to find 15-30 minutes to stop and think.
I didn’t, but I wish I would have.
When can you find 15 minutes, two to three times per week, to think about and work on your Word of the Year?
2. Journal
Do you ever have a fantastic idea you can’t wait to implement? And then, for some reason, you are distracted, and then you cannot recall the groundbreaking concept you had a day, an hour, or five minutes before?
Outside of not living intentionally, this would be why some of my Words have felt dry. The reason was twofold: I didn’t take the time to write down the ideas and didn’t have a system to record them.
I am not a journaler, but most of the people I admire are those who write down their thoughts and ideas. Again, I’ve never been a journaler, so I had no idea how to get myself to that point. Determining to figure this discipline out, I literally googled “How to Journal.” Not surprisingly, pages of options were opened up to me.
It worked.
My journal probably doesn’t look like many other people’s, but I now have a collection of thoughts (mine and others). The biggest plus to this new element of my life is the habit of writing or copying things that speak to me throughout the day.
I maintain two journals, both digital. I handwrite in one while in the other, I type notes, quotes, or links to intriguing articles and videos. I utilize an iPad Mini, Apple Pen, and the Notability app for my handwritten journal, mainly during my early morning meditation practice. Almost all my other notes are done using the Apple Notes app on my phone and computer.
This practice is invaluable as I look back throughout the year. It reminds me of what I’m learning. If you are at all impressed by the little nuggets I pass along, then you should first be thankful I journal. Just as important, you have similar pieces of wisdom inside of you. You think of them all the time, but you most likely don’t have a system to capture them.
How will you begin or add to your process of journaling?
3. Accountability
There are two vital parts to being accountable — initiation and follow-through—and both are equally difficult.
Your willingness to share personal insight can be very intimidating. Who knows what that person may think? This is why I encourage sharing your Word in person as a first step in the Word of the Year process. Speaking your word out loud to another person makes it real in a way that doesn’t happen as an internal, personal project.
However, to really grow and learn from this project, you must follow up with those you share your word with in the following weeks and months. Ask them to quiz you on what you are learning. Have them force you to consider what you gain through your word in the middle of the year.
This second step of accountability is vital to learning from your Word of the Year.
This Substack site is my accountability.
When I shared my 2024 Word CONTENT and then went on to say how impactful this project is, I put some of my credibility on the line. I followed those posts with another series last August. Again, it forced me to reflect on the year. As I looked over my journals and thought about what I had experienced, CONTENT became real in a way it hadn’t before.
This leads me to my offer for you.
Quarterly Meet-ups
I want to make accountability possible for you. I hope you have someone you can share your Word with outside this community, but I also want to present a way for this group to learn from one another. Let’s hold one another accountable for learning and growing from our Words of the Year.
Our first gathering will be Thursday, January 30, at 7PM (Central). It will be completely virtual so that anyone can attend. The meeting will last no longer than one hour.4 I will teach a few of the principles I’ve shared on this blog and share a few new anecdotes. Then, I will open it up for you to share your Word and what you hope to learn and ask any questions you might have.
All the details for joining the meeting will be provided in next week’s post.
Until then, consider my three tips from above:
Find your time and space to process your Word of the Year.
Begin developing a journaling practice that works for you.
Find a person or group of people to hold you accountable this year.
Let me close by thanking a few new subscribers: Zach, Don, Debbie, BR, and TJ. I also want to thank Carolyn and WC, who created paid subscriptions. It is humbling to know that you value this information enough to add more to your email inbox.
I continue my quest for 700 monthly email subscribers (I seem to lose and gain at about the same rate), so if you have someone you think would value this information, please share it with them.
For you math nerds who noticed those numbers don’t add up to 100, the other 28% were a mix of answers labeled “Other.” More info HERE.
I plan to use Google Meet to host these sessions. The free account limit is one hour, but I wouldn’t want to go any longer than this anyway.