Two Hacks to Make Your New Year’s Resolutions Stick
January 2, 2026—Yesterday was New Year’s Day, and the talk in our house was all about resolutions, as well as intentions, manifestations, and goals, for the year ahead. We all shared our resolutions, which led to some lively discussion. My resolution is to live each day with as much health, grace, and wonder as possible, and I promised (out loud) to renew this resolution every morning. When it comes to health-related resolutions, the sad truth is that gyms are full of people in January who have resolved to improve their health, only to see most of them gone by February. I reminded my daughters that our resolutions and wishes for change get realized with what we do every day. That’s why I intend to renew my resolution every day.
Another word for resolution is want. You want to improve an aspect of your life that will make your life better. It could be better health, better habits, working harder or working less, or achieving some other goal. In my experience, the gap between wanting to change and actually changing revolves around two related aspects that help me make the change happen. As much as we want to change, real and lasting change is much harder than it looks. Here are two hacks to make your New Year’s resolutions stick—two aspects of changing behavior that will help you attain your goals.
Hack #1: Renew Your Resolutions Every Day to Keep Them Fresh
The first aspect of changing a behavior is simple: I renew my resolution (or intent or want) every day and sometimes more than once a day. I do this every morning, either when I am doing my breathing exercises or my morning movement routine. Refreshing my resolution to live each day with as much health, grace, and wonder as possible brings me back to the importance I’ve placed on trying to live this way and not get sidetracked.
I encourage you to try this simple approach to keeping your New Year’s resolutions fresh in your mind throughout the year. These daily reminders will help you make wise choices every day that will lead to successful results.
Hack #2: Overcoming Your Resistance
The other aspect of changing behavior is more challenging: It’s learning how to overcome our natural resistance to change. Most people think willpower is the main ingredient for a behavior change by forcing yourself to adopt a new outlook or habit long enough to make it stick. That kind of determination and grit helped me start my change journey—my desire to significantly improve my health to ensure I’d be around for my two young daughters. But at some point along the way I had to confront, and still confront, my resistance to changing my behavior.
Resistance has many faces, but for me, it has always been linked to the fear of changing and my attitude toward myself. Wanting to change means wanting something to be better than it currently is. This has always brought me face to face with the bigger question: “Do I deserve to have this improvement in my life?” I can now answer that question with a resounding “YES!” But this wasn’t always the case.
As Stephen Pressfield writes in his great little book, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles, resistance presents itself whenever we take on the task of doing something that is self-beneficial. It can present itself as procrastination, tiredness, avoidance, substance abuse, food abuse, sex, rationalizing why we shouldn’t do it, and the many other ways we avoid important and self-beneficial tasks in our lives. Most of us suffer from this inner resistance. It’s not hard to think about a task, project, phone call, or exercise routine we wanted to do but never got around to doing.
Resistance has different roots and plays out differently in each of us. But we always experience it as a feeling, usually fear, that keeps us in the loop of status quo and comfort. In my case, resistance is always linked to fear, and I need to allow myself to feel that fear and not ignore it. Once I acknowledge that I’m afraid and embrace the fear as part of the process of getting where I want to be, I can begin the work at hand. And just because I managed to overcome my resistance yesterday doesn’t mean it gets any easier today or tomorrow. After all these years, I am still usually anxious or nervous when I go to the gym or a yoga class, or start writing, or begin many other activities. But I’ve learned the benefits of moving with the fear and coming out the other side, so I embrace the fear as part of the process of reaching my goal of staying healthy by paying attention to my body and my soul. The resistance isn’t comfortable, it never is, but it almost always leads to enjoying the activity more and feeling fulfilled in the end. It is the door that points me toward where I need to go.
Enter Stage Fright
I have known many actors in my life and spent quite a bit of time in the theater, and I’ve gotten to know some really great, well-known actors. The better actors are generally nervous before a performance. They can act calm, but they rarely are inside. And they always have stage fright before a show, even after many performances of the same show or many years of acting on stage. Sometimes this nervousness is quite severe, causing rashes or upset stomachs. But the stage fright gets their juices going and lets them be sharper and more spontaneous, bringing freshness and newness into each show. My point? Embrace the “stage fright”—the resistance you are likely to encounter as you make behavior changes to attain your New Year’s resolutions.
So, if you’ve resolved to do something to make your life better this year, take a moment every day to refresh that resolution and remind yourself why it’s important to you. And don’t ignore the fact that something inside you will be resisting the changes you want to accomplish. Work with that resistance, acknowledge it, feel it, and embrace it. Don’t allow it to keep you from being the person you want to be each and every day.
