As you’re taking down the decorations, picking the tinsel out of the carpet and recycling gift boxes, you’re probably pondering your New Year’s resolutions.
Nearly half of all Americans make New Year’s resolutions. Unfortunately, just 8 percent achieve them.
The top resolutions in 2014 were losing weight, getting organized, spending less and saving more, enjoying life to the fullest, staying fit and healthy, learning something exciting, quitting smoking, helping others achieve their dreams, falling in love and spending more time with family.
All worthy — even inspiring — goals. But research shows that the more time goes by, the harder it is to remain resolved. After one week, 75 percent of those who made resolutions had kept them. After two weeks, the number dropped to 71 percent. After a month, to 64 percent. And by the end of six months, to 46 percent.
Amid the clamor and clatter of everyday life, it’s not surprising that even the most motivated among us have trouble staying the course. Indeed, even those who sustained their resolution for two years reported lapsing more than two dozen times.
Slip-ups were most often spurred by feeling a loss of personal control, excessive stress, negative emotions, social pressure, interpersonal conflict and even positive emotions.
But there is an antidote to the kind of mindless reactivity that pulls you off track. It’s called mindfulness, and it’s having a moment.
The centuries-old contemplative practice has made its way to the C-suite and has been covered at length in the pages of the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Forbes, the Financial Times, Fast Company, the Economist and Wired.
Simply put, “mindfulness is the ability to pay complete attention in the present moment, seeing things without judgment as they are and not as you want them to be,” writes Emily Bennington, an author and speaker who teaches mindfulness to her clients.
It’s a way of settling what Bennington calls the “snow globe mind” — stopping your thoughts from swirling and creating a sense of heightened awareness.
When you’re distracted throughout the day — listening to a conference call while responding to emails, chatting with a colleague while scanning the conference room to see who’ll arrive next, or working through lunch — you’re “not present in the present,” Bennington says.
That can lead to the kind of stress and anxiety that produce bad decisions and make you less effective as a leader, a parent and a person, Bennington says.
Mindfulness means taking a “moment of conscious pause to center in to where you are,” she says.
That mindful moment, she says, creates the mental space for more thoughtful and creative choices.
“People ask, ‘Where did this year go?’ but if you’re mindful, that doesn’t happen,” Bennington says. “If you’re present in the moment, time seems to expand for you.”
Ellen Langer is a Harvard professor who has studied mindfulness for more than three decades. She recently explained to the Harvard Business Review how mindfulness produces optimal outcomes.
“It’s easier to pay attention. You remember more of what you’ve done. You’re more creative. You’re able to take advantage of opportunities when they present themselves. You avert the danger not yet arisen. You like people better and people like you better because you’re less evaluative. You’re more charismatic.”
With benefits like that, being more mindful may be a resolution that sticks.
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