MAXIMISE Women’s Business Magazine | Main Feature | Health & Wellbeing
Why business owners are bordering on insanity; New Year resolutions, FLOW and the art of goal setting. They say that doing the doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome is the first sign of madness. Yet making, and failing, at New Year’s resolutions has been going for some 4,000 years since the ancient Babylonians. In the Babylonians case, they were bargaining with their Gods that they would pay off their debts and return all borrowed items in return for a favourable year ahead. Early Christianity and some Evangelical denominations now still practice setting resolutions for the year ahead based on the previous year’s sins. These days, we tend to make promises to ourselves rather than the Gods, promises that
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involve improvements to both our business and our personal lives. The practice has become part of our self-improvement culture. The biggest puzzle is that while most of us do it, we are all equally aware that the statistics of success are truly appalling. 8% is often quoted as the figure of those who stick to their new found resolves. So why does it have such low success rate? The first reason is that many of our resolutions are not authentically ours. From childhood, we absorb other people’s ideas and philosophies of how we should be and how we should behave. We then spend most of our lives striving (and inevitably failing) to match this imaginary person. If you cast
