Don't ditch your New Year's resolutions just yet! As February approaches, Jay Shetty has a practical approach to help you refocus goals with a growth mindset based on the core pillars of mindfulness and meditation.
"Resolutions come around and we all know that the reality is fairly painful, that the majority of us will not end up achieving them," Shetty told "Good Morning America" candidly, adding that "90% of people end up abandoning their resolutions in just a few months."
According to the former monk and global bestselling author, the commonly shared problem among those who ditch resolutions early often happens due to a "lack of growth setting."
Shetty believes "it's not a surprise that we don't achieve our goals because our goals tend to be big pie-in-the-sky ideas, things that we wish we had, that we want to have, that we hope to have. And they often seem so unreachable or out of touch."
"I generally find that goals are things that we want to do, or things we want, as opposed to who we need to be in order to achieve those goals. So if goals are what we want, growth is who we need to be to get to that goal," Shetty explained.
To give a real life of example of the concept, Shetty said if the goal is "to work out more, that means you need to be more disciplined. If we just make the goal, 'Hey, I want to work out more this year, we lose out on the growth, the fact that we need to build discipline."
"Growth setting is making it really clear to say, 'This is the skill I'm going to develop, this is the mindset I'm going to build, this is the focus or the attitude that I'm going to cultivate and nurture,' because that will lead to the goal automatically, in and of its own accord," Shetty concluded.
Shetty, who has worked with the mental health brand Calm for two years, launched a first-ever video mindfulness series for people to try a new approach for achieving goals.
The so-called Chief Purpose Officer created the 7 Days of Growth series to provide users with daily three-minute videos that encourage actionable ways to build a personal growth toolkit for 2024.
Each day of videos focus on one small step "based on the key tenets from a mindfulness point of view," which Shetty said "have been researched and practiced for years" to mesh timeless wisdom and modern science."
1. The Skill of Presence
2. Shift Your Mindset
3. Setting Daily Intentions
4. How to Soften Your Emotions
5. Letting Go of Control
6. Reframing Your Self-Talk
7. Lowering Your Stress Level
"We have to have every pursuit include the idea that we will need to pivot and we probably will trip up," Shetty said. "That's OK because that's how life works and there isn't someone who's done something every day of their life for the rest of their life -- which is often what our goals look like."
Shetty's solution? Create your goals with the understanding that a plan will probably fall apart. "When you remove that probability in your preparation, you almost set yourself up for a surprise and a more challenging situation," he said.
Subsequently, the award-winning podcast host of "On Purpose" finds acceptance with grace goes a long way in this process.
"We've developed this idea that we can hate ourselves into change. Like, if only we hate ourselves enough, and we make ourselves feel bad enough, then we'll do something good," he said. "We have to love ourselves into change. And so when we try and use guilt as a motivator, it may get us going in the short term. But it doesn't lead to growth in the long term, it leads to more guilt, more shame, more embarrassment."
Instead, Shetty said that "if we can take on a mindset of grace and recognizing in the beginning, we're just using it as a technique to be kinder to ourselves, to be calmer with ourselves, to be more accepting and understanding of ourselves -- that's what actually motivates us to change when we feel loved and we feel cared for."
Know what kind of year you need to have
"There are four types of years that we can have," he said: a learning year, an experimenting year, a performing year and a thriving year.
"We want every year to be a thriving year, but the truth is, there are three other years that we need to have in order to have thriving years," he added, recommending "setting yourself up in the beginning and saying, 'What year is this for me in my life? What is it that I need?' rather than thinking every year has to be the masterful, success, best year of my life."
Don't get tripped up by timelines
"Use every new beginning within the year as a new beginning -- whether it's a new week, a new month, a new year or even a new day," he said. "We often think we have to wait till the next Monday to start a new habit and get it right again -- but that mindset only sets us up to have more days where we fail rather than more days we do well."
Using this "each day is a new day" approach, which Shetty said is a core mindset of the seven day series, makes a goal manageable, achievable and "it becomes something worth celebrating, rather than the pressure of thinking, 'Gosh, how am I going to do that every day this week?'"
Win the day first and you win
Ultimately, he encouraged people to try to live in the present moment, despite being surrounded by worldly pressures, and take things one day at a time.
It's hard cause we feel like, 'If I do this for the next seven months of my life it's going to transform.' But it's almost like, 'if I do this today, then my life is gonna transform.'"
