New Year, New Me: How to Stay Motivated and Actually Succeed

I wasn't trying to be hateful, but I really wasn't making any effort to check my judgmental thoughts at the door.

It happens every January. My regular classes at the gym get bombarded by all of the New Year, New Me folks determined to work on their fitness. It feels too cramped, and it changes the dynamics.

But that's not the part I was judging.

I want people to be happy and healthy and live big, bold lives. I want everyone to come experience the Saturday yoga class that I kind of live for. 

What I was getting grumpy about is that almost all of them will be gone in three weeks as their New Year motivation fades and they fall back on old habits. 

It ends up feeling like my life gets disrupted for no good reason.

As a psychologist, I understand, more than most, how difficult it is to change behavior. I'm aware of the sneaky factors that conspire to keep us stuck. What if you were, too? 

What if you had the cheat codes for actually sticking with your New Year's resolutions and intentions? What if you could look back a year from now and say, "Dang! I crushed 2025!"

Finding Motivation  

You can have all the skills and know-how in the world, but if you don't use them consistently, it doesn't really matter. You have to have motivation. 

Unfortunately, motivation often feels elusive, like some slippery thing that magically shows up sometimes, then disappears just as quickly. That's because most people don't understand the complexities of it.

Learning to manipulate your motivational system is one of the most powerfully impactful things you can do. 

Who Are You?

Changing habits is tough, and we could write an entire book about it. In fact, James Clear did. If you haven't read his Atomic Habits, you're missing out. It's a comprehensive, yet completely approachable how-to manual for starting and stopping habits. Given that your life ends up essentially being the sum of your daily actions, it's hard to underestimate how important this stuff truly is.

One of the pieces that Clear talks about - and this is something I see most people overlooking in the motivation/New Year, New Me/I'm going to change, I swear department - is the power of identity. 

Identity is a psychological concept, and a very important one. 

Your identity is the deep-down often subconscious set of beliefs about who you are, what kind of person you are, and what people like you can and can't, should and shouldn't do. In other words, it's your mind's program for " how to [insert your name]."

The reason we're talking about identity here is that it's one of the sneaky factors that sabotages your success.

You may join a gym and drag yourself to a few workouts, promising that this is the year you finally get in shape, but if your deep-down identity doesn't support that, meaning you don't actually know yourself to be someone who works out or can do hard things or has discipline or likes exercise, then lasting change is going to be a challenge.

We have to shift our identity if we want new habits to stick. We have to fully become the kind of person who does that new thing.

And it's not as simple as just being positive or just telling yourself, "I'm now a gym bro."

I love the way Clear explains it. Summarizing liberally, he says that with each action, you cast a vote for the kind of person you want to be. 

The Sidekick

"Who is this Sidekick showing up right now?" 

'What?" I confusedly asked. 

I was walking with my dear friend, Amanda, a brilliantly insightful therapist who practices through a different lens than I do.

She shared that I was expressing a lot of insecurity and doubt and that I was sounding more like a Sidekick than a Leading Lady.

It was an interesting observation, not something I had noticed. The way I was feeling and thinking in that moment hearkened back to High School Ashley, who was socially anxious and saw herself as 'less than'—the Sidekick to her cooler friends.

It is definitely not the part of me I want calling the shots in my life, now or ever again.

Since it's been named, I can recognize when the Sidekick is showing up and choose to act differently, embodying courage and confidence rather than being small.

Inside each of us are many parts—the Sidekick, the Lazy Bum, the Impatient A**hole, the People Pleaser, the Fragile One, the Loser, the Unworthy One, the Selfish Jerk, the Procrastinator, the Worrier, the Impulsive Guy, the Risk Averse Gal. They are facets of our personality, mental apps if you will, that run in certain contexts. They get activated automatically in the right circumstances, and they take over, guiding our actions if we let them.

We can't necessarily delete them, but we can hijack our minds and regain control. We do this through our behavior. 

The Two Wolves

There is a powerful story that I love to share. Supposedly, it's a Native American parable, and it goes something like this:

A grandfather tells his granddaughter, "Inside each of us are two wolves, and they are at war. One wolf represents everything that is evil in this world. It is hate. It is fear. It is shame, greed, envy, everything that is bad. The other wolf is good. It is joy, love, compassion, confidence, pride, and peace."

The little girl takes it all in. Then she looks at her grandfather and asks, "If the wolves are at war, which one wins?"

To which he replies, "The one you feed."

Becoming the Success Story You Want to Be

Actions speak louder than words, and you can do something even when you don't feel like it, aka, when motivation is lacking.

According to some statistics, we make upwards of 30,000 decisions a day. This number is staggering. And it does two things for me. 

One, it takes the pressure way down. If you miss the mark and feed the bad wolf, big deal. You have 29.999 more opportunities to feed the good one. Don't let one out-of-alignment decision derail your motivation or progress. One poor food choice is not a green light to binge. One losing your temper moment isn't permission to snap at people for the rest of the day. Regroup and keep going, knowing that the little things add up.

Two, the little things do add up, which makes it incredibly important to take small steps consistently. As Aristotle said, "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."

Each decision point, each choice, each action or behavior is an opportunity to cast a vote for who you want to be. Do you want to be the Sidekick or the Lazy Bum or do you want to be the badass who does hard things? 

"Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become." - James Clear