(This is the second part of a four part series on Why Your New Year’s Resolutions Won’t Stick. If you haven’t read part one. Stop and check it out here before continuing.)

When you think about your New Year’s resolutions – they probably feel very personal.

You’re probably telling yourself that you need do it all by yourself. You have the willpower and the ability to stick to it to make your goals happen.

You don’t need anyone’s help.

It might almost feel like weakness to need someone else to help you with your goals.

I always used to tell myself the same thing.

That I didn’t need anyone’s help. That I was smart enough and capable enough and that I shouldn’t ask for help. That I shouldn’t have to ask for help.

That I was weak or a failure if I needed someone else to help me.

That’s when I was stuck in the frustrating cycle of failing on most of my New Year’s resolutions before the end of January and wondering why I wasn’t achieving my goals.

Then I started to dig into the science – and made a simple but profound shift that flipped the way I think about goal setting on its head.

It doesn’t have to be that hard. And you don’t have to do it alone.

Along with power of accountability, I discovered that “going it alone” is often the toughest approach.

In fact, many of the expert guests I’ve had on Science of Success agree that the people you surround yourself with have a huge impact on whether or not you achieve your goals.

Surround Yourself with the Right People

You’ve heard “you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

But what does that really mean?

It means you need to surround yourself with the right kind of people to become the person you want to be.

You need to have a community of people who support you and help hold you accountable to your goals.

In my own struggle with this, I interviewed Keith Ferrazzi, relationship expert and best-selling author of one of my all-time favorite books Never Eat Alone.

He shared two key ideas with me.

The first is that we have to stop thinking about the dirty word “networking” and start thinking about real relationship building.

The second big lesson?

Admit that rugged individualism isn’t reality.

Ferrazzi says that the “greatest things in our lives are only going to happen through co-creation.”

What does that mean for your New Year’s resolutions?

What if you had a group of people committed to helping you achieve your goals and holding you accountable?

Imagine the power of a group of friends that would be excited for you when you finally hit that goal and would be there with you when things get tough.

Ferrazzi says releasing our attachment to “I have to do this all by myself” lets us make space for co-elevation by working with others to help each other.

He says “that’s the next generation of real networking.”

Scott Gerber, CEO of The Community Company and founder of Young Entrepreneur's Council, says, “There is no ‘Five Steps to Success’ of relationship building,” but you have to focus on genuinely building long lasting relationships with the kind of people you want to become. 

Gerber says you should be asking yourself these questions as you prepare to develop the right network to achieve your goals:

1. Who do you want to surround yourself with?

2. How do you want to live your life?

3. What kind of service and value do you want to bring to a community of peers?

4. What community do you want to create for yourself and around yourself?

These are some of the questions that helped me make the shift towards realizing I couldn’t do it all myself.

Surrounding yourself with the right people is the second big key to achieving your goals.

Use Behavioral Science to Make Your Goals Effortless

The key is realizing that once you’ve surrounded yourself with the right people – your goals start to happen naturally – without the tiresome effort and energy of trying to push yourself and use willpower to make your New Year’s resolutions stick.

Dr. Sean Young, Executive Director of the University of California Institute for Prediction Technology and professor of family medicine at UCLA, says, “We're taught to become someone else or put the blame on ourselves or others if we don't follow through.”

“If you want to get yourself to stick with doing something, it doesn't start from the mind, it doesn't start from you telling yourself, willing yourself, ‘I want to do this.’ It actually starts from behavior. It starts from changing your behavior. Then your mind will follow.”

Dr. Young identifies community as one of the most important tools for changing your behavior.

“Community,” he says, “is the idea that [it’s] social support and competition and other people that really gets us to stick with things.”

Reflecting on his own successes and failures, this is what Scott Gerber said was missing in the early days of his career.

In a very telling moment, he shared with me that back in 2010, his first business had failed miserably and almost bankrupted him.

“I had no one around me of real value, and I don't mean value in the sense of money or connections. I mean people that could’ve helped me in the rough times.”

After hitting that low, he went on to found Young Entrepreneur's Council and define his own brand of authenticity-forward success.

“It wasn't to create a sphere of influence around young entrepreneurs,” he says. “It was because I genuinely wanted to have real conversations with people that had similar experiences to me.”

Scott Gerber says what ultimately needed was to get a group of people and “mastermind our way to find mutual success.”

Scott Gerber realized that he could not be a team of one or a success powerhouse on his own, he realized that bringing a community around him was the missing ingredient to achieving his goals.

You can make the same shift in 2019 to tackle your New Year’s resolutions.

In the next parts of our Elevate 2019: Effortlessly Achieve Your Goals Without Stress & Overwhelm series we share the exact strategies you can use to make this shift for yourself and how you can create the kind of accountability and community you need to crush your goals starting right now.

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