Why Do Most New Year’s Resolutions Fail—and How Can Yours Actually Work?
Before you set another goal for 2026, learn the one mindset shift that turns resolutions into real results.
The New Year is full of ambition—but also full of abandoned goals. In this episode, we unpack why traditional New Year’s resolutions often fall flat for business owners and sales leaders, and how you can reframe them to create lasting change that sticks. Whether you’re skeptical about resolutions or love the clean-slate feeling of January 1st, this episode will give you a smarter, more sustainable path forward.
Here’s what you’ll take away from this episode:
- The science-backed reason most resolutions fail—and what to do instead to maintain momentum.
- A simple 3-month system for turning vague goals into everyday habits that drive real business impact.
- How adopting the “1% Better Every Day” mindset can quietly transform your performance, your team, and your year.
Tune in now to set yourself up for consistent wins—not just for January, but all the way through 2026..
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Episode Transcript
Ben Wright:
In this episode, you’ll discover how to make sure those New Year’s business resolutions actually stick.
Intro:
Welcome to Sales Process Made Easy, the show helping seven to eight figure industry construction and trade, sales and business leaders finally end the stress of inconsistent sales by simplifying your sales systems so your team can close more deals and grow faster.
I’m your host Ben Wright, a leader who has been building businesses and sales teams just like you for the last 20 years.
Ben Wright:
By the end of this episode, you’ll have an expanded skill set around why New Year’s resolutions are fantastic for some but not so good for others, why they often fail, and how you can make New Year’s business resolutions really stick for your business.
New Year’s resolutions, I have to admit, are something that I generally won’t set each year and the reason I do that is because I’m generally a very structured person who likes to sit down and plan and New Year’s resolutions often tend to be things that come off the cuff sometimes on New Year’s Eve at the strike of midnight or afterwards in the wee hours themselves and aren’t always necessarily backed up with facts. For others, New Year’s resolutions, I understand, can be very powerful because once you have an emotional connection or an emotional drive behind what you want to do, they can really propel you into the next 12 months.
Unfortunately, the way that New Year’s resolutions are often set up, being in the moment without significant thought and detail, mean they’re destined to fail and the reason I say that is because without the structure or the support structure to help you implement those New Year’s resolutions, it’s very, very difficult to get started and momentum is certainly a key driver of habit change.
When we think about time it takes to embed or to remember new things that we’re doing, a really common rule of thumb that I’ve used and there’s plenty of literature out there around is that it takes 21 days of doing something before you can memorize it and then three lots of 21 to automate it, right, and to make it part of your routine. So, what that means is 63 days or in essence 63 business days which is 12 weeks. So, you’re three months away from where we’re at now to really embedding any habitual change into your business or your business life.
Now, what’s really difficult here is that in three months’ time, business owners or sales leaders have absolutely no idea what we be doing. Life moves so fast, we have so much on the go that to be focusing on a New Year’s resolution that far down the track, well, hey, it’s Easter time, we’re worried about hot cross buns or school holidays or where our next holiday ourselves going to be or avoiding, you know, the cold winters or whatever’s coming next. So, to really be able to hold on to a New Year’s resolution is super, super difficult for many, many people.
Thankfully, I discovered a number of years ago a way that works exceptionally well to keep the focus on ongoing improvement rather than a specific resolution. And what I mean by that is a concept or an approach or a way of life that allows you to improve consistently. Now, this phrase wasn’t invented by James Clear in Atomic Habits but he’s certainly popularized it around the world in recent years and I love his book and I’d encourage you to read it. It’s called Atomic Habits by James Clear. But the tagline here is being 1% better each and every day or 1% better every day as our sold-out sales teams academy works on all of our team members with. We have a real focus on that as a concept, right? The 1% better every day thing is all about making sure that we have a consistent approach to being better at all things we do in life, better at home, better in health and fitness, better with our family, better with our friends, better in our mindset, better in our business and our ways of working. And where we compare that with a New Year’s resolution, well, then we’re starting to build a little superpower, right? Cape goes on, we really start to then become people who are really difficult to compete with and beat because all we want to be doing is getting better.
So, my encouragement when you’re thinking about your New Year’s Eve resolutions or your New Year’s resolutions for the coming 12 months is how you can tie them back into a process or a theme around being 1% better each and every day.
If you listen to Episodes 154 and 157, what they did was set you up with 6 to 14 focus items that you can work on over the next 12 months. So, I’d encourage you to go back, take this concept, take the 1% better every day approach, roll it into Episode 154 and 157 and see how you can set yourself up to be having small wins every day. So, if one of your goals, for example, was to improve your engagement with customers, a small 1% better every day could be that you have 15 minutes blocked in your calendar that is all about calling customers. And that goes into your calendar each and every day and you slowly implement it. You may start it twice a week, next week, three times a week after, four times a week after that and then move into five times. But by having that in your calendar, it’s reserving a little bit of time and you’re making that to speak with customers.
If you’re in a business where you can do it in the car, go for it. If you’re in a business where you can do it early hours or after hours, go for it. I’m not worried about when you do it, what I am worried about is that you start to build the habit. Because when we can really look at that 1% better theme and roll it into some specific goals, as I said, cape goes on, superpower really starts to roll out. That’s the absolute focus I’ll be taking into the next 12 months. It’s the focus that our Sold Out Sales Team Academy team members are taking. And by the way, we have a whole lot of terrific merchandise around 1% better every day. So give me a call or make contact if you’d like to hear more about it. We got drink bottles, we got hats, we got singlets, we got pens, notebooks, a whole lot of cool stuff, socks, that we roll out around the 1% better theme. And I’ve seen it used terrifically and I’ve used it terrifically across teams to really help their engagement. So it’s a nice little perk of our Sold Out Sales Teams Academy.
But I’m not here to talk about that. I’m really here to talk about making sure that you can take some goals for 2026 and apply them into a 1% better theme.
So to recap for today, New Year’s resolutions often don’t work for people because they’re made often at an emotional point of time without supporting facts or process or structure to help them work. The way you can do it or the way you can make sure that you have New Year’s resolutions or goals that work for you is to sit down and strategically think about what they can be. Episode 154 and 157 will help you with that. And then from there, apply the lens of a 1% better everyday theme. Little things that you can do each and every day to embed these for your first 21 days and then in total your next or your total 63 days. Because if you can get that right, I’d hope that you’re leaving today again like some of our recent episodes with a sense of calm or even excitement that the next 12 months ahead, you have a game plan that will help you improve. Because when we’re improving and learning and growing, things generally are going to get better around us.
Thank you everyone for listening in today. I think early in the New Year, it’s tough to get into podcasts, but I hope that just this little 10-minute here of podcast listening can help really set you up for the next 12 months. We’re dropping episodes this year every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, same time, but they’re going to be short and sharp and punchy to leave you with really practical outcomes. Between now and our next episode, please keep thinking about that 1% Better Every Day theme because when you can apply, it absolutely will make all the difference. Bye for now.
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