You Need a Coach B*tch

The Fresh Start Effect

• Chris Hale • Episode 107

Share episode

Let’s dig into why New Year's resolutions often crash and burn, shall we? Spoiler alert: it’s that toxic cocktail of all-or-nothing thinking and perfectionism that trips us up every time. In this episode, we’ll call out those self-sabotaging habits and serve up a fresh perspective: compassionate goal-setting. Because guess what? Beating yourself up won’t get you anywhere. Instead, we’ll focus on finding that deep, juicy, intrinsic motivation to create changes that actually stick.

What we explore:
• Understanding National Quitters Day and its implications for resolutions
• Exploring the "fresh start effect" and its motivational power
• The dangers of all-or-nothing thinking when setting goals
• Shifting from rigid goal-setting to practical, achievable steps
• Embracing failure as an opportunity for growth and learning
• Challenges of habit formation for neurodivergent individuals
• Finding motivation beyond novelty through intrinsic values
• Strategies for maintaining engagement and consistency over time

Episode 87:Are your resolutions just self-criticism disguised as self-improvement?  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/you-need-a-coach-b-tch/id1623805363?i=1000641297688

Where to find me:
Connect with me on Instagram
Check out my website
Sign up for a free consult



Speaker 1:

Hey Bestie, how's it going? I hope you're doing well. I'm having a pretty good week so far, although it's only Monday as I'm recording this, so I mean not much could have gone wrong yet. Anyway, I want to dive right in today and talk about some stuff. It's the third week of January, so we're past National Quitters Day. Have we talked about this National Quitters Day?

Speaker 1:

It's the second Friday of the new year and it's basically when people sort of give up on their resolutions. Now, there are probably lots of reasons why this happens, but I wanted to address what I think some of the huge issues are with our resolutions Now. Last year around this time we talked about not setting resolutions that are basically just judgments in disguise. So if you haven't listened to that, check it out. That was around the new year last year. I'll link it in the show notes. It's definitely one of the reasons people end up abandoning their resolutions, for sure, but the other reasons are kind of rooted in our perfectionism and our all or nothing thinking that I know a lot of us struggle with. So I wanted to talk about that today. Not that we don't talk about those things on a regular basis, but I want to talk about it in this context. So let's back up a little bit. First. Why do we set resolutions at the beginning of the year in the first place?

Speaker 1:

Well, I recently read about the fresh start effect in an email from Dr Megan Anna Neff. She is co-host of the Divergent Conversations podcast. She has a great Instagram account called Divergent Insights and she does Venn diagrams for, like, miss Diagnosis Monday. When she talks about the differences between, like, all the different kinds of like neurodivergent things like OCD, autism, adhd, complex trauma, like she just is, it's really informative and, anyway, I just love her information. I'm also on her mailing list, and so this came in an email that she sent and I thought it was super relevant and I wanted to share it with my audience.

Speaker 1:

So what even is the fresh start effect? Let's start with like a little definition. I got this from just a quick Google search. It was like in the context of productivity. So in the context of productivity, the fresh start effect refers to the psychological phenomenon where individuals are more inclined to pursue their objectives and implement positive changes following temporal landmarks such as the start of a new week, month or year. That makes total sense, right? We've all been there. We open up our planners to like that new date and we get this like burst of motivation, basically to start conquering shit. We're like I'm going to do the damn thing in the new whatever. New week, new month, new year we get all excited about all the things that we can do with that clean slate in front of us. Right? These temporal landmarks give us the ability to kind of put some distance between who we once were and who we desire to become, so they feel really exciting and refreshing.

Speaker 1:

Dr Neff actually put this really beautiful in her email, so I'm just gonna read what she wrote. She says they give us a before and after, making it easier to see ourselves as new and improved. I mean what who doesn't want to see themselves as a new and improved version of themselves? That's what, like new year, new me is all about. We hear it so often.

Speaker 1:

She also goes on to say that these landmarks boost our belief that we're capable of change, sparking a surge of motivation, and I think that's where, like mindset really comes into the equation. Here is this idea that we're capable of changing. If we don't believe that we're capable of change, then we're not going to be able to do the thing that we want to do. So. These temporal landmarks are kind of giving us this little extra boost in our belief in ourselves and we need to kind of think about how we hold on to that belief in ourselves. That's where belief work really comes in. And so you know, do you have a plan set up for your belief work around the goals that you're setting for yourself in this new year? And lastly, she says the idea of a clean slate creates a psychological sense of renewal, making change feel more accessible. So if you're not on her mailing list, I highly recommend she sends out some great emails.

Speaker 1:

Check her out on her Instagram. Listen to Divergent Conversations. Check her out on her Instagram. Listen to Divergent Conversations. It's two ADHD therapists that talk about so many things. They recently did series on autism, adhd, ocd, giftedness. They're doing a series right now on psychoanalysis and how that can help people who are neurodivergent. So great stuff there.

Speaker 1:

Anyway, when we look at the fresh start effect right, that's why we lean into the new year so hard and like why we start to get serious about our goals, like around our birthdays. Or right, when we see a new week coming, we're like, okay, I'm going to start on Monday fresh, but this is where we can kind of shoot ourselves in the foot. If you're anything like me, you might be prone to all or nothing thinking and perfectionism, so we need to be on the lookout for those sneaky guys. I use this example a lot because I think it's relatable, but an example of all or nothing thinking in terms of goal setting is setting the goal that I'm going to work out every day for an hour. So the all or nothing there is that we believe it's not worth doing unless we're doing the literal most. We can do this with money goals and like our spending. We can do this with weight loss goals, like you name a goal and there is a way to all or nothing it.

Speaker 1:

So check in with your resolutions or your goals or your intentions whatever you've set for the year right now and see if you've made them so strict that you literally have to be a robot in order to stay on track. If so, what adjustments can you make to those goals in order to make them a little bit more practical? Right, remember achievable goals. We talked about that a while back. This is a place to apply that principle. So, again, if you haven't listened to the episode on achievable goals. I would go back and do that and kind of brush up on it.

Speaker 1:

Perfectionism is going to look like abandoning the goal if we mess up at all. So we set a really discompassionate goal of working out every day because we think that we're a machine, and then a few weeks in we miss a day and we make that mean that we failed and that there's no reason to keep going toward our goal. We'll just wait to start over again next week or even next year. A lot of times we'll completely abandon that goal because of the perfectionism and we won't come back to it until another year goes by, right? This is often why we'll see the same unmet goals on our list every year, year after year, because we keep starting and stopping, because at the first sign of failure we give up. So what do we like do about this?

Speaker 1:

One thing that I've really leaned into that Dr Neff actually suggested and talks about is is my values. So I've really talked about my values for other parts of my life, especially my business and what I want to be infusing, you know, into it and where I really want to be showing up from. So I have to really think about like, why do. I really want to exercise and, for me, I want to feel good in my body, I want to get out of chronic pain and I want to feel more energized, like those are the things that I value. So that's where I have to really look at, like, what are my plans going forward? So you know, killing myself on the bike for 45 minutes a day, every day, is not going to help me achieve, like, getting out of chronic pain and feeling more energized right, that's going to burn me out. So instead I have committed to 20 minutes twice a week to start and coming off a six-month break.

Speaker 1:

This sounds like a really gentle way to get back into it. I also want to do some strength training, so I need to factor that in to my plan. But I need to start small, like that's where we're going to be. We're going to be starting small and we're going to be building and we're not going to be believing that, unless we're doing the most, we're not doing enough. Because, like, enough for what? Right? This is where we go back to. Enough for helping me get out of chronic pain, helping me feel more energized, feeling good in my body. I can do that working out three to five days a week, gently.

Speaker 1:

I'm also getting really comfortable with failure, so I am really determined to not make failure mean anything and my ability to keep going. This is for my business goals as well. Like right now, I have a goal to send out an email every single week for the entire year. Now I am saying for the entire year, but will there be a week where I don't send one out? That might happen, and so I have to really combat that perfectionism with compassion.

Speaker 1:

I don't need to be perfect to be safe. I don't need to be perfect to be worthy. I also don't need to be perfect to meet my goals. It's better that I show up like good enough, with consistency, than like trying to show up perfectly, imperfectly, sporadically. Does anyone else always think about clueless when they hear the word sporadically? Okay, anyway, I get to make mistakes, right. I get to make mistakes. I get to learn from them. Every mistake is an opportunity for growth. And you know what? Sometimes that growth looks like processing my way through a shame spiral, but it's just a feeling, and I'm able to feel big things and not let them completely take me down. This is one thing that grieving has taught me this past year that I am capable of those big emotions and I can keep going. So those are two of the ways that we can really look at dealing with our all or nothing thinking and our perfectionism.

Speaker 1:

There's one more thing I want to touch on and it's specifically for my neuro spicy friends, but I think it's like valuable for everybody. So I found out this past year or in the last two years studying up on ADHD, learning about it, that as an ADHDer, we don't form habits. And this makes so much sense to me because I always struggled with this idea that it takes 28 days to form a habit because I could do something for a month straight. I did that with beach body workouts. I would do 21-day fix and then I would just keep going and I would go for two months and then one day I would just 21 day fix and then I would just keep going and I would go for like two months and then one day I would just stop doing it and it was like I never did it in the first place, like there was no habit formed. I didn't like wake up and feel like, oh, I got to do my workout, like on autopilot, it just was over. So if you're like me, maybe you're not able to stick to things because the point where habit formation should kick in never really does. So we need to look at how to create incentives to keep going.

Speaker 1:

For the neurotypicals, getting the thing done is enough of a motivator. The completion of a task itself gives them a dopamine hit. But like we don't get that, I don't feel that I don't get a high off of just completing a workout. I need something else. This is where, like, understanding the key motivators for ADHD years is really helpful. So their interest, novelty, challenge, urgency and passion. So that's why tapping into values can really be helpful, right, so that's helpful for everybody and that's definitely helpful for us neuro spicy folk because that's going to help with, like, our interest, right, like we're really interested in adhering to our values, showing up in accordance with our values, we can be really passionate about the things that we value. So those are a couple of things that really help with that.

Speaker 1:

Other things to think about are when it gets to the point where the novelty of the fresh start wears off, right, where we've sucked all the dopamine out of our newest obsession, we need to try to tap into some of these other motivators. So, like challenge, does it help to have a workout buddy that we can have some kind of friendly competition with? That gives us that challenge aspect right. Or do we need to like go to a class? Like I'm really, you know, interested in getting back into class and having that motivator of other people around me. Right now I'm just riding from home because I'm trying to get myself back into shape where I can handle being in class. But I'm not there yet. But I know that, like at some point when I am going, and being a room full of other people who are pushing themselves is going to help me for that kind of a parallel play, like working alongside someone else, but also the challenge aspect of it, of like if they're pushing themselves, I can push myself too.

Speaker 1:

Or is there something that we're like really fascinated by in regard to our workout that we can lean into right? Like maybe it's about like really understanding form, really understanding like the way to put together a really amazing workout. Like if we can kind of tap into interest there and get really like geek out a little bit and sort of make it a little bit of a special interest, then that's going to keep us motivated to keep going. So I think some of those things can work for neurotypicals too. I think it can be helpful for anyone to sort of tap into some of these things once the motivation from that fresh start starts to wear off. So that's what I've got for you this week. I would love for you to report back to me and let me know how it's going with these goals and if you found anything that's working for you to help keep you motivated as the months go on, and I hope you have a great week. Bye.