For better and worse, the new year brings with it a lot of expectations.

I love working towards goals and I fully back anyone who is driven to take personal responsibility for the things they can influence and change. But we've all heard the anecdote: lots of people take out a gym membership in January and rarely attend past February.

Why? Because most people try to make too big a change, too frequently, too soon. (Yep, I’m in the ‘most people’ category too).

Unrealistic expectations set us up to fail (or fall asleep) at the first hurdle.

Small changes in behaviour that are repeated (and scaled up) over time allow new patterns of behaviour to form so that the habits we desire can stick.

Here's a slightly sideways example:

Say your New Year's resolution is to 'start flossing your teeth'.

I’ve chosen this example because it's a basic and specific task that might lead us to overestimate what is achievable and because I refuse to believe this is something most mortals manage to do every day. If you’re that unicorn, comment below so that I know it’s possible because you exist!

If you're starting from a place of "I managed to floss my teeth 0 times last year", "I will floss my teeth every day" is not very realistic. You’d be giving yourself zero opportunity to mess things up. You’d be giving yourself zero allowance for all of the factors that will mess things up for you. Life, eh?!

If you're starting from scratch, "I will floss my teeth once a week" is probably achievable because it allows room to forget and fail. You have given yourself 7 opportunities to succeed. Of course, you might massively overachieve and later revise your aim, but if you don't? You will have met your modest goal and managed to do something 52x more than you did the year before. A 52x increase is huge! It's a confidence-boosting, future-proofing win-win.

Are you giving yourself zero opportunity to mess things up? Or, 7 opportunities to make good on that promise to yourself?

Don’t make your goals a tick-box exercise in self-punishment this year. Things will go sideways and your energy and motivation will fluctuate. This is ok, this is life (and life can be unavoidably sucky at times).

You don’t need to:

• Catch up aka the “I’ll do double tomorrow” trap that makes an already unrealistic goal even more unachievable.

• Or, give up aka the “There’s no point, I’ve already failed” trap, which will only result in making you feel terrible for not being able to achieve something that a superhuman would struggle with.

Instead, you might need to:

• Revise your goal, your approach, or your timeframe 

• Press pause, or change course

You can (almost) always start again.

You don’t need to wait for next January, the start of a new month, or the start of a new week. 

I came across this little scribble as I was flicking through my old class plans in preparation for making new ones:

It’s ok. You’re ok. Start again.

I have no idea if this was a reminder for myself, or a prompt for me to remind someone else. Either way, it doesn’t matter: compassion for yourself and others is always relevant. Especially when things don't go to plan, or the way you hoped.

You can take another small step towards what you want to focus on as soon as your circumstances allow.

Good luck, I’m rooting for you!