Approach health resolutions as new skills to master

This is the season for reflections and resolutions. It will be immediately followed by the season for failure and frustration. That’s because people who make health-related New Year’s resolutions also make a big mistake: They look at them as an issue of willpower rather than ability.

A more helpful approach to creating more healthful habits is to consider those behaviors new skills, and to accept that there is a process to becoming competent in those skills. In other words, you shouldn’t resolve to become a vegetarian with the expectation that meat will never pass your lips again, and then feel failure when you succumb to a Big Mac. Instead, consider resolving to learn to be a vegetarian, with the understanding that it will take knowledge and practice to attain a meat-free diet — just as it would take knowledge and practice to learn to play tennis or knit or carve wood.

To understand why this works better, consider the Conscious Competence Learning Model. This is a psychological explanation of the process one goes through to select a lifestyle or behavior change and slowly but surely build it into a skill that seamlessly fits into your life. Also known as the Four Stages of Competency, the model is attributed to the work of psychologist Thomas Gordon and his employee Noel Burch in the 1970s.

The four stages are as follows, according to the Gordon Training International website:

Stage 1: Unconsciously unskilled. We don’t know what we don’t know. We are inept and unaware of it.

Stage 2: Consciously unskilled. We know what we don’t know. We start to learn at this level when sudden awareness of how poorly we do something shows us how much we need to learn.

Stage 3: Consciously skilled. Trying the skill out, experimenting, practicing. We now know how to do the skill the right way, but need to think and work hard to do it.

Stage 4: Unconsciously skilled. If we continue to practice and apply the new skill, eventually we arrive at a stage where they become easier and, given time, even natural.

For best results, making a New Year’s resolution or creating a new habit should go through these same phases. The reason so many resolutions fail is that people think taking on a new nutrition, exercise, mindfulness or health habit should be easy.

If you want to apply this model to a change you want to make in the new year, embrace the idea of practice. Enjoy it. When things don’t go right, remember it’s just practice.