Jonathan Sibley's Coaching & Psychotherapy Blog

What is your track record with New Year’s resolutions? If you are like most people, it has been difficult to make lasting progress with most resolutions.

What if 2013 were different? What if you could take steps to maximize the chances that you will be successful this time? Now is a good time to be thinking about your resolutions for 2013, so let’s start by thinking about why each resolution is important to you.

Most New Year's resolutions are, at best, valiant efforts doomed to fail. It's important to ask why so many efforts, repeated year after year, fail within months, if not weeks.

I believe that there are at least 4 reasons that most New Year's resolutions are ineffective and discarded long before achieving our goals:

Just as the message received by your partner may not be the message you thought you were communicating, the message you think you have received may not be the message your partner intended to communicate.

Your partner may say something that leaves you feeling:

• Hurt
• Embarrassed
• Ashamed
• Angry

Your brain may react almost instantaneously, so quickly that it seems obvious that your partner must have known you would react like this and that he or she must have intended you to feel this way. Sometimes, this may be accurate.

One of the most common sources of misunderstandings and fights in the couples I see comes from an assumption that our partner is understanding what we communicate the way we intend them to understand it. You may be familiar with a game called “telephone”, in which a message gets passed orally from one person to another – often, the message has been completely transformed by the time it reaches the last person.