For Big Leaps With New Year’s Resolutions, Start With Baby Steps

January 8, 2019 Modified date: February 5, 2024

Thanks to the Lean Enterprise Institute for publishing my article about Kaizen, new habits, and New Year's resolutions:

Take Baby Steps Towards Improvement

“As 2019 begins, don't feel bad if your New Year's resolutions have already gotten off track or if that has happened in the past. Various studies suggest that 80 to 90 percent of resolutions fail. Whether our resolutions are about doing more of something, like reading, or doing less of something, like eating brownies, we often get tripped up because our change is too large — it might be framed as all or nothing. Lessons from psychology and workplace continuous improvement approaches show that “baby steps” is a more effective approach to making our resolutions take hold and stick.”

2 COMMENTS

Mark Graban January 9, 2019 At 8:05 am

One story from the book “Unlearn” talks about baby steps at Disney:

I’ll be interviewing the author, Barry O’Reilly for my podcast series…

Mark Graban January 9, 2019 At 10:12 am

Another article along these lines:

“Why making New Year’s resolutions is a bad way to start the year”
Chances are your life doesn’t need a major overhaul. Tiny changes to make you slightly new and improved are probably best.

Likewise, most of the changes in behavior that you make should be of the “new and improved” variety. Small changes that enable you to do what you already do more effectively are likely to succeed…

An advantage to these tiny changes is that you will still make an improvement to your life, but you’re likely to succeed. You give yourself an emotional boost for improving your life without the frustration that comes along with a wholesale disruption.