1 day Ago By Anil Bhatnagar
As we welcome 2025, many of you might like to develop New Year resolutions such as walking 10,000 steps, doing yoga, reducing screen time, reading books daily, and quitting smoking, meat, dairy or alcohol. However, writing these resolutions is easier; implementing them is what most people find daunting. Changing any habit requires creating an alignment between the rider (the conscious intention), the elephant (the unconscious mind or the implementor), and the path (the environmental cues that prime the elephant to implement).
Here are 11 power-packed strategies based on neuroscience to create this alignment and transform your resolutions into habits: 1. Speak to your elephant in its language, not yours. Introduce your intention to your elephant in an “If/When.
..Then” language it can understand.
For example, “When I have brushed my teeth...
then, I go out and start my daily yoga exercises” or “If I find myself thinking something negative, I start observing my breath.” 2. Let the trucks push the cars.
“Trucks” are the robust habits you never miss (e.g., brushing your teeth in the morning), and “cars” are the intentions or weak habits whose engines have gone kaput and cannot run independently.
“Cars” must be pushed by the “trucks”. So, find a “truck”—a daily habitual activity you never miss—and refuse to do it unless you have done your “car.” The itch to do the “truck,” because it is a strong habit, will compel you to do the “car” so that you can do the “truck” you are itching for.
Sometimes, when you cannot or don’t want to put the “car” before the “truck” (e.g., you do not want to do yoga before brushing your teeth), use the truck as a cue to tow (remind you of) the new, proposed activity to follow it with.
3. Frequently think about your compelling reason for your need to change, imagine yourself successfully doing the proposed new activity, and feel intense pleasure and pride in achievement for being able to do so. To find time to think, imagine, and feel these, earmark your non-productive time slots, such as visits to the washroom, bathing, waiting at a traffic signal or in a queue.
4. Use the power of cue-response associations. A cue is anything that primes us to offer a habitual response.
Seeing your smartphone is the cue, and starting to scroll is your elephant’s automatic programmed response. You reinforce any cue-reaction association whenever you respond to the same cues with the same reaction (desirable when it is a good habit). You weaken it when you disrupt the pattern (desirable when you want to kill a bad habit).
5. Develop mental toughness. Mental toughness involves three things: ● Anticipating and mentally preparing yourself for the challenge of switching to the proposed new habit.
● Giving yourself “no option” but to perform the proposed new activity in the earmarked time slot. ● Doing what will help you achieve what you want the most in the long term instead of what you feel tempted to do now. 6.
Invent deterrents and enablers. Deterrents are deliberately introduced obstacles that protect you from an undesirable habitual activity (e.g.
, keeping your smartphone away from your reach). Enablers make it more likely for you to do your proposed new activity. Keeping a bottle of water near you will act like an enabler in achieving your daily goal of drinking two to three litres.
7. Instead of using your willpower, restrict the availability of choices. It takes less willpower to return home without visiting the confectionary shop than to bring sweets home and fight against the temptations throughout the day.
8. Break down any big-sized change into smaller chunks. Sometimes, people feel challenged and hence discouraged by the size of the big goal.
So, instead of saying that you will write a 365-page book, set the goal of writing one page daily. 9. Never set more than two “change” goals in one go.
When the sun's rays are scattered all around, they don’t have the power to burn, but when you use a magnifying lens to focus them at one point, they can burn the paper. Similarly, the more “change” goals we seek to pursue, the less energy and focus are available to each. 10.
Review at regular intervals. Keep a journal to record the days you could or could not implement your resolutions, and never miss them on two consecutive days. Review your progress at regular intervals, identify your reasons for performance gaps, invent strategies to address these reasons and implement these to improve your performance.
11. Keep your resolutions a secret. Sharing resolutions makes our unconscious mind receive the dose of thrill without doing the necessary homework to deserve it, diluting our reason to persevere.
However, you can share your daily commitments (not the end goal) with a friend you value and who may hold you accountable. With the above strategies, you can maximise your chances of turning your resolutions into deep-rooted habits. May 2025 bring health, happiness, peace, purpose, and the necessary discipline to achieve all these.
Anil Bhatnagar is a corporate trainer, motivational speaker, and the author of Success 24 x 7, among several other books. Email: thrive.ab@gmail.
com.
