Do you make New Year's Resolutions? Or perhaps you prefer to choose a word that is going to be a theme for the year to come.

Choosing a word seems to be growing in popularity (and I enjoy it). But I was curious is it more effective than making a New Years Resolutions or is it just a fad? If it is more effective why would that be so and how can we gain the most from this reflective practice.

The media certainly suggests that people don't keep new years resolutions. I am guessing there is a number of factors at work there, often the resolutions are made without much prior thought or reflection and are spur of the moment thoughts. There are often well used resolutions that return to us year after year - get fit, drink less coffee/alcohol, stop smoking. They are about the things that we think we ‘ought’ to do, not really the things that we want to do. Setting a resolution in the style of New Years, also doesn’t follow most theorizing and research on effective goal setting. There is much more to it than simply saying this year I will get fit.

I couldn’t find any research on the idea of choosing a word and how it may impact goals and motivation for the year ahead. But my guess is that most of the words that are chosen for this purpose represent values. It is an exercise in identifying how we want to live and perhaps it helps us to identify ways of being that are important to us but were lacking in our life last year. The value or theme word helps us know who we want to be, and how we want to act throughout the coming year. Taking the time to identify your values is a helpful exercise and the research clearly shows that values play an important part in motivation. Putting a value in the center of your year provides a why for what you are doing, it provides an internal reason that moves you towards something, rather than restricting you from things you don’t want. Using the example of a New Years resolution of ‘get fit’, if we changed that to a core value, we may say something like ‘care for my body’. It immediately has a less punishing and more nurturing focus, and it more firmly intrinsically located (my body).

Choosing a word centers us on what is important but it doesn’t actually help us to finish those projects and gain some accomplishments in our year. That is where goals (not resolutions) can come in to help us gain that sense of achievement that is so important for our well-being. The theme words once it is set, lead us towards some well-crafted goals. These need to contain both long term goals, broken into shorter term steps, they need to have a positive focus and stem from the intrinsic motivations that are captured by the theme word or value. If we continue with our example of care for my body, we can derive long term goals (loose weight, be able to walk as fast as my son) and short term goals (replace every chocolate with a piece of fruit this week, park one street further away from work so I walk every day). Now when I go to eat that orange instead of the Tim Tam I have a reason - I am caring for my body - and a long term goal - I want to be able to walk as fast as my son, that will keep me motivated for longer.

Putting these two practices together could be what moves you forward this year.