Resolved: You will better understand your clients' brains — and your own.
The temporal landmark that is the new year is a prime springboard for making plans to pursue a goal or change a behavior. Whether ambitious — I will retire by age 50 — or modest — I will figure how much of my recycling actually gets recycled — most resolutions fall by the wayside, a victim of habits and biases. Knowing what helps thwarts your aims, along with why a time-based milestone fuels mental accounting, is key.
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"I will get in shape" is not a plan. "I will lift hand weights three times a week in my living room before dinner" is.
"I think of goals like baking recipes," said Ayelet Fishbach, an authority on motivation and decision-making at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, in a 2022 interview with Scientific American. "You need to list the exact quantities: "Walk 10,000 steps a day" is better than "walk a lot," because it tells you how much (10,000 steps) and how soon (by the end of the day)."
A 1981 paper in the journal Management Review coined the acronym
Be persistent but patient
A 2009 study in the European Journal of Social Psychology found that it takes anywhere from
Let it go
Persistence, grit and hustle are embedded in the American psyche as virtues. But sometimes, letting go of an objective can be just as important and productive as setting a new one.
A burgeoning field called goal disengagement explores how resolving to stop pursuing a plan can set into motion salutory behavioral, cognitive and affective processes.
A 2022 paper in the journal Motivation and Emotion noted that the COVID-19 pandemic "has been a particularly stark reminder that sometimes goals cannot be achieved or that their attainability is at least uncertain." That's also an opportunity: Goal disengagement, it said, "is adaptive in the sense that it frees resources for future engagement with other goals.
We talked to seven in wealth management about their New Year's resolutions. Scroll through the cardshow:
