As February falls behind us, most New Year’s resolutions have already failed.

During a recent team meeting online for my day job, we did a round-robin share of what we decided would be our New Year’s resolutions for 2024. The conversation wasn’t exactly progressive. It wasn’t actually encouraging to be honest.

The round table was filled with the usual goals of losing weight, eating better, understanding others better, saving money better, etc. However, it appeared the theme was that no one in the meeting believed in creating New Year’s resolutions anymore because most often than not, those resolutions are hardly ever met. Myself included, who was one of the one’s to tout weight loss as a 2024 focus.

New Year’s resolutions are a way people put unnecessary pressure on themselves to make changes in their lives. The problem with them is the formality of it. The formality creates pressure, which leads to larger disappointment if there is failure, and if there is failure it ultimately leads to eating a sleeve of Oreos while binge-watching episodes of TV’s The Real Housewives of New York. Just me? Fine, I’ll move on.

My day job is in sales. Moreso, I’m a sales coach and I am constantly training and providing sales people in my purview strategies to improve their performance and achieve goals they did not think were possible for themselves. Most commonly, if I come across a salesperson who is not achieving their goals, the reasons for it usually originate with that person being unable to get out of their own way and on a path to success.

To put this simply, that person has fallen into a comfort zone. It’s the same for New Year’s resolutions. People usually make resolutions to do or achieve things that year which require them to move out of their comfort zones. However, like I tell my salespeople, moving out of your comfort zone first requires an understanding of the components of it.

In his book The Light in the Heart, author Roy T. Bennett said, “Do not lie to yourself. … We have to be honest about what we want and take risks rather than lie to ourselves and make excuses to stay in our comfort zone.”

Now does taking risks mean we have to do something drastic like skydive out of an airplane just because having our feet on the ground is our comfort zone? No. It’s about taking steps to extend your comfort zone, not take a flying leap out of it. Unfortunately, most people don’t recognize how to do this, and to do this, one has to understand the components of growing out of it.

A comfort zone is simply responding to a stimulus by remaining where we feel safe and in control. This is completely natural for everyone, myself included. For me, growing my comfort zone can take weeks or months. When we are faced with adversity, we stick to these zones so we can remain where we feel we have control over the situation.

However, the first step to growing our comfort zone is acknowledging and moving into the “Fear Zone.” A lot of us will have no problem moving into the fear zone, but sometimes we have trouble acknowledging that’s where we have drifted. The fear zone is where we make excuses for not taking steps to our goals. We allow others’ negative opinions of our goals and efforts to intercede and derail us from them, and there is a lack of confidence moving forward.

However, simply recognizing these feelings and outer influences can help move past them. This is important because recognizing them and training ourselves to not make excuses and ignore negative influences will allow us to move into the “Learning Zone.”

The learning zone is where your comfort zone starts to grow. Imagine someone who never completed high school or never got to go to college. My mother lost her father at age five and her mother passed away at age 18. Although she had just completed high school, when her mother passed, she and her two older siblings quickly found themselves caring and providing for their younger three siblings. They were all forced to find work instead of going to or continuing their college aspirations.

A person in that position could easily find excuses and be faced with negative influences if they were to decide they wanted to apply to attend college as an adult years later. This was the case with my mother.

However, she learned to deal with changes from the adult life she had known to go to college. She dealt with the problems in her life presented to get a post-secondary education, and it was dealing with those changes and problems which let you know you are now in the learning zone. You start to acquire new skills and you are now extending your comfort zone.

Lastly, as your comfort zone begins to grow, you start to achieve your objectives. This is the “Growth Zone.” In this component, we start to find ourselves living dreams we’d had which once seemed impossible. We start to find a new purpose. Our eyes start to open like a newborn baby’s.

And it’s in this zone, we start to feel confident enough to set new goals for ourselves.

So failing at New Year’s resolutions doesn’t mean our efforts to improve and achieve new things have to end. It’s about recognizing what kept us from reaching those goals and dealing with them. It’s about understanding we are not jumping out of our comfort zones but rather we are attempting to expand and grow them.

Being cognizant of your goal and what keeps you from it can often still help you develop as a human being. So putting added pressure on yourself to achieve them can be nonsense a lot of the time. Bruce Lee once said, “A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at.”

So do your best to steady your aim, and let me know how it goes.