Reframing Resolutions as Possibilities

Goals, Agency, and the Many Shapes of Success

From Footnotes for Flourishing – reflections on psychology, personal development, and growth.

This week the BBC News published a story asking experts for their advice on New Year’s resolutions. There’s something about that calendar change from December to January that equates in many people’s minds to a prompt to up their game and finally do those things they’ve been putting off, often relating to health, exercise, and diet. But intentions are cheap, and it’s their structure and framing that determine whether they translate into action.

For each of the BBC article’s suggestions I’ll give a brief summary, then explore them through a Footnotes for Flourishing lens, ultimately arguing how we can reframe the whole idea of New Year’s resolutions.

Realistic owned goals

Most New Year’s resolutions fail either because they are too broad, vague, or unachievable, or because they’re framed as pressure statements (‘I must exercise more’) rather than experiments (‘I’m going to try parkrun and see if I like it’).

I’ve previously discussed the importance of having clear, actionable goals. They may easily push us out of our comfort zone, but they shouldn’t have to push us too far. Think value-added: cutting down rather than cutting out, or doing one more exercise session a week are both much more realistic than stopping using social media completely or going from being a non-exerciser to running 4 times a week. Building on what you already do by nudging existing behaviour is much more likely to help translate your resolution into action.

Agency is very important here too. Why that particular resolution? Is it something you actually want to do, or something you feel that you ought to do, through pressure from yourself, friends and family, or society at large? Do you want to lose weight or exercise more because the doctor has told you that you ought to do so? Owning the decision yourself can strengthen the resolve, so reframing the doctor’s suggestion as your choice to build your own fitness and give yourself more energy might be valuable.

Lapse, relapse, and all-or-none thinking

Relapse is not a breakdown of discipline but an inevitable feature of change, and resolving ‘never’ to drink again or ‘always’ to cycle to work rather than drive, or run ‘every’ parkrun next year are all likely to become unsustainable goals. In the end, persistence matters more than perfection.

Let’s face it, life is unpredictable. It tends to get in the way unexpectedly, and there may be all sorts of quite valid reasons why you can’t meet these resolutions. Perhaps you’re stressed at the end of the week and a friend buys you a beer, which you both want and would feel rude about refusing, so you drink it; your bike is broken and you need to go on somewhere after work, so you drive; bad weather cancels a parkrun, or you’ve twisted your ankle, so you can’t achieve your weekly 5k. Despite your best intentions, you’ve lapsed, and perhaps this was inevitable.

What’s important is how you treat this lapse. Not doing something once when we’ve resolved to do it every day is, at its core, just that – missing a single instance. But it’s so easy to interpret this as ‘The End of the Resolution’, and thus ‘Complete Failure’. This narrative of collapse is particularly unhelpful, often resulting in giving up completely on what you resolved to do. And all-or-none phrasing of resolutions is a big part of this narrative. Moreover, New Year’s resolutions have a social weight, and labelling an intention in this way can create expectations both of comparison with others (‘I’ve not fallen off the wagon yet, have you?’) and of lapse being seen as failure of identity, leading to self-nagging rather than behavioural nudging.

But missing a day and being willing to pick up the activity the following day is, I think, a much healthier option. True, it takes a certain level of agency, and various mindset characteristics will make picking up again easier and more likely. These might include: self-compassion (‘I didn’t do it yesterday, but that doesn’t make me a bad person’), self-belief (‘I’ve done it every day until today, and I’m counting that as a success’) and reframing the omission as an opportunity for learning (‘Why didn’t I do it today? How can I make it easier tomorrow to do so?).

I’ve previously talked about how we define goals, and the motivations behind them shape whether we see the outcomes as successes or not. Why exactly are you resolving to cycle to work every day? Is it for exercise, because of your environmental views, or because petrol is too expensive? How you view not cycling to work once will depend on the context behind your resolution, and if it’s for environmental reasons, then taking public transport may still meet the underlying intention behind the resolution. Indeed, you can proactively reframe the resolution itself to soften its edges and allow yourself to substitute a related activity where needed. If you can’t run parkrun one week, you instead run 5k on the treadmill, or if you’ve twisted your ankle, you consider volunteering for parkrun once you’re mobile enough in a more static role. These should help you still see your actions as successes despite not being what you originally planned.

There may not be just a single lapse, but a re-lapse, time and time again. And acknowledging in advance that the world gets in the way and there will be times when you don’t do as you originally intended can be a powerful tool for picking the activity up again after relapse. If we remember that progress itself is a form of success, just as much as the final outcome or product, then seeing all those occasions when you did achieve your intention should help put the occasional lapse and relapse in proportion.

What’s more, persisting with something difficult in the face of relapse is often more valuable to your growth and sense of self-worth than perfectly achieving your goals every day. We learn from things not turning out quite as we want them (what some people call ‘failure’ but that’s too negative a word) and it helps us develop resilience and plan more effectively for next time. Reframing failure as an experience from which to learn is powerful.

Stack your habits

Habits stick when they are woven into existing routines and environments, not piled on through motivation alone.

Habit stacking, according to James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, is the process of attaching new habits to existing, ingrained ones, so that the existing habit works as a cue to the new one. For instance, you could change out of your work clothes immediately after you take your work shoes off, or put your plates in the dishwasher as soon as you finish eating, instead of putting them on the side. With a salient cue already there, the new habit becomes easier to embed into your everyday. This environmental curation might help guard against another reason why resolutions sometimes lapse, which is that they are just forgotten, what with no cue present and weak motivation. Making habits and resolutions part of your self-concept can make them easier to turn into actions.

Positive, focused goals

Goals framed positively and narrowly are more achievable than sweeping attempts to change everything at once.

Any resolution worded to expect reward or removal of something unpleasant is more likely to be continued, not least because the benefit is clear. Saving money, another common New Year’s resolution, may be very difficult for some people in straitened financial circumstances, but identifying a particular positive outcome, such as a holiday, and accepting that little and often is better than none at all, can help motivate this resolution.

Timescale can also be an issue. Many behavioural changes of the sort that people choose as New Year’s resolutions tend to require long-term, maintained motivation to achieve them, things like diet and exercise. Changes in health, weight, and energy, for instance, won’t normally become apparent overnight, so these behaviours need to turn into habits and be maintained even in the absence of any apparent benefit. And that can be a problem for anyone who does not like to delay gratification - they want the easy reward now (staying in bed, eating the cream bun) rather than the arguably more valuable one later (going for a run for long term fitness, not snacking when food isn’t really needed). Recognising and accepting this in advance can help too.

Why New Year? Why resolutions?

There is nothing intrinsically special about January 1. This blog is about growth, flourishing, and allowing ourselves to be the best that we can be. But that is something that we can do continually, any day and every day. My January 1 was in fact October 5 for starting to publish Footnotes for Flourishing, and October 18 for parkrunning.

And crucially, neither of them felt like resolutions at the time. I planned that I would continue blogging and parkrunning if I found doing so rewarding in some way. If no one read my first couple of blog posts or I received lots of negative comments, or if I’d slipped while running and broken my leg, or just found the parkrun atmosphere and effort unpleasant, I probably wouldn’t have carried on. I did decide to have a go and see what happened, but I also gave myself permission to stop. It wouldn’t be a failure, whatever happened, but perhaps a learning experience from which I’d go on to other things.

Making a firm resolution to do something can put enormous pressure on the resolver, making it both feel like an obligation and a chore, rather than an authored choice, and ultimately making it likely that the intended behaviour will cease. And as I’ve argued above, the danger is that this will be seen as a failure. Try something new, experiment with your behaviours, but don’t make yourself beholden unto them.

Rather than New Year, New You, let’s frame it as New Day, Same You (Only More So). Less of a public label, more of an authored route to growth.

Happy Flourishing in 2026.

Image credits:
Via ChatGPT