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Why the Spring is an Ideal Time to Renew Your Goals
WORDS: Nathalie Le Mottee MD, Healthhaus
Research shows that 80% of people give up on their New Year's resolutions by the 2nd week of February! If this is you then don’t be downhearted, the Spring is the perfect time to revisit and renew your goals. For me the thought of a new season and lighter days puts me in a really positive mood and makes it the perfect time to reassess what I really want for myself. Tony Robbins recently said: “What most people call ‘resolutions’ are really just desires . . . they wish would happen. The majority of people aren't actually resolving anything within themselves.” This is certainly true as it’s all too easy to become swept up in the excitement of New Year’s resolutions and to set yourself a list of well intentioned but unrealistic goals. Once we realise that achieving these goals often requires enormous amounts of effort, they soon start to become not so important to us unless we are 100% clear about WHY we want to achieve them. 10
Another reason that we fall off the wagon is that we are often told it only takes 21 days to form a new habit. We’re positive that we can dedicate ourselves to doing something (or not doing something) for 21 days and voila, our lives will have changed. But it’s not that straightforward and we become disillusioned when it doesn’t happen.
So where did this notion that we would form new habits after only 21 days come from? This theory became common thinking in the 1950s when a plastic surgeon called Maxwell Maltz began
to notice a pattern in the length of time that his patients stopped sensing a phantom limb or got used to seeing their new nose. He did some more research and wrote: “These, and many other commonly observed phenomena tend to show that it requires a minimum of about 21 days for an old mental image to dissolve and a new one to jell.” Maltz’s work influenced many leading professionals from life coaches to motivational speakers, however what ensued was a game of Chinese whispers until at some point the public was being told that they could form a new habit in only 21 days! The truth is that Maltz said this was the minimum time required and lifelong habits can take months even years to develop.
