Making Space

‘Tis the season for New Year’s resolutions, strategic goals and growth targets. The time to shake off tired, unfulfilling drudgery and hustle boldly towards transformation and success. Yet we know, from experience and statistics, that come March, our best intentions would be buried under the grind of routines and responsibilities, slumbering until they could be dredged up and recycled for another year. 

Our failure is so assured that every leadership guru worth their salt – from Tony Robbins to some guy on Instagram – will publish some sort of advice on how to make your resolutions stick (with the requisite algo-bait tagline: Resolutions don’t work, here’s what you should do instead!) 

Instead of yet another listicle, let me offer a glimpse into the cognitive science of goals and behavioral change to shed light on what works to increase our chances of success, not just for New Year’s resolutions, but for any kind of lasting transformation. 

Roughly speaking, meaningful change requires a combination of the will (wanting) and the way (doing). 

The will refers to the desire to achieve a goal and prioritize it over other goals. “Wanting” involves motivation and reinforcement learning; resolve can be sustained even with modest rewards. The way reflects taking action to develop the means – skills, capacities, knowledge – needed to achieve a goal. "Doing" engages the executive function, a suite of higher-level cognitive capabilities such as attention, task switching, working memory, and inhibitory control.  

In the context of a new year, there is perhaps no shortage of enthusiasm and optimism to grow and change. However, engaging the executive function consistently over time is harder. This is because the mental processes involved are effortful – consume significant mental resources, conscious – anything we do becomes the center of attention in a given moment, and novel – it’s something we’ve never done before. In other words, “doing” requires focus (one task at a time), prioritizing (foregoing less important tasks), and openness (to mistakes, failures, trying).  

This suggests that the best way to make progress on our goals is to set aside dedicated, distraction-free time and mental solitude, rather than vision and mission, strategies, frameworks, mindset, affirmations and positive thinking.  

So, whatever we want to achieve and whenever we choose to embark on them, let’s remember to make space: allowing enough time to learn new skills, enough energy to overcome barriers and enough grace for setbacks and restarts. 

Happy 2026.