Forget New Year’s Resolutions. This Year, Try Setting Your Conditions.

Well, it’s that time of year again, when we look back at the year that was, and look forward to the year ahead. Of course, part of this yearly ritual is making new year’s resolutions. You will have undoubtedly already encountered many other posts and articles talking how you can make better resolutions or make the resolutions you have stick. I’d like to suggest taking a different approach entirely. Rather than making resolutions, I suggest namely taking this time before the start of the new year to set your conditions.

Conditions differ from resolutions in that they aren’t goals and milestones or to-do lists, but an expression of how you want to live your life. The distinction between resolutions and conditions may seem arbitrary, but as you will see knowing your conditions is one of the most powerful tools for creating the life you want.

For something than can have such a powerful impact on your life, setting your conditions is actually pretty simple to do. There’s and exercise that I learned from my first business coach, Garth Jackson, and it requires only a pen, paper and some time for reflective thought.

Here’s how it works:

1. Take a piece of paper
2. Draw a line down the middle, and another across the center, so you have four quadrants
3. In the top left, write “Must Have”
4. In the top right, write “Can’t Have/Won’t Do”
5. In the bottom left, write “Nice to Have”
6. In the bottom right, “Will Accept”

Now, here’s the part to where you need to do some deep thinking. In each quadrant write a list of the things in your life that correspond to the label of the quadrant:

Must Have’s are what must absolutely be part of your life. You will work actively to make sure they happen, they are your starting points.

Can’t Have’s/Won’t Do’s are your deal breakers. If these things are present, you’re out.

Nice to Have’s are the things that if you did get, you’d be grinning ear to ear, but you can live without them.

Will Accept’s are the things that you’d prefer not to deal with but will accept to get where you want to go.

As you make your lists, be really mindful of what you put where, especially what you establish as Must Have’s and Can’t Have’s/Won’t Do’s. Your Must Have’s and Can’t Have’s become the starting point for designing your life, and the things you put in those quadrants have a tremendous amount of power to shape how you approach and experience the world.

The other thing about conditions is that they aren’t prescriptive in terms of HOW you satisfy them. You can satisfy them through a variety of different means and different contexts.

To demonstrate the power of conditions, let’s look at the classic New Year’s resolution, “I will get in shape and lose weight,” and translate that into a condition.

The first step is to look at the big picture, “why do you want to get in shape/lose weight?” Different people will have different answers, but let’s say it’s “I want to feel good and confident about my body.”

There are a number of ways you could approach this. You could get your work out on, shed pounds, add muscle and all that. Or you could decide you are actually pretty happy at your current weight, and it’s not really about weight or fitness, but more about rest, and de-stressing, and rejecting external body shape ideals. But either way, it means that you need to make time for self care, to engage in the fitness activities that speak to you and to make space for rest and being on top of the foods you eat.

So “time for self care becomes a condition,” and where you put it has a tremendous impact. If you put it as Nice to Have, then you’ll get to it when you can, which will often be, well, never. However, if you put it as a Must Have, suddenly your approach changes.

Now you have to build your schedule around making time for taking care of your physical self. You have to figure what self care means to you, what options you have. It’s a starting point so now you are planning your days and weeks to make sure that self care happens and figuring out how everything else fits in, versus trying to squeeze it in around the rest of your life.

You can also up the stakes a bit by adding another condition that you think might be a Nice to Have and move it into a Must Have. Building on our example, another condition might be whatever you do for self care has to be super fun. Now not only are you making the time for self care, you have to thinking much more carefully to figure out what would be fun. No boring treadmills allowed. Diets that bring no joy are not fun, and are out!

Suddenly your life is by design. And that’s the true power of conditions vs resolutions.

You can use the conditions exercise use for your life, business, relationships, job opportunities and any other kinds of decisions.

One final thought. If you really want to push the envelope, I suggest taking a Nice to Have that feels totally ridiculously impossible to you and move up into the Must Have’s. You may be surprised at the ways you start shaping your life and what’s really possible for you.