Friday, December 28, 2012

Skipping New Year's Resolution in 2013?

Contemplating New Years' resolutions and plans during that down time between Christmas and New Year's Day has been one of my favorite activities. Peter Bregman tries to make an argument that we should consider not doing this. His arguments are that it can drive unethical behavior in organizations - employees focus on meeting their numbers goal at the expense of the customers. For individuals, Peter instead suggests that people should focus on the behavior they want, the path they want to take, and not on the numbers. For example, focus on establishing heating healthy habits instead of loosing a specific number of pounds. If you do that, you will have a good chance of meeting and maintaining a good healthy weight. Yea, that has a lot of appeal to me. But isn't that really just changing the type of goals you set - away from arbitrary numbers and towards desired behavior changes? I still like contemplating new goals for the new year.