It’s January 5th. Five days ago, you had a vision. Maybe it was waking up at 6 AM, or finally committing to that meditation practice, or launching the side project that’s been living rent-free in your head for two years. The champagne bubbles carried certainty. This year would be different.
And now? Something feels off. The 6 AM alarm feels punishing instead of empowering. The meditation app sits unopened. The side project document has exactly one line: a title you’re already second-guessing. You’re not failing, but you’re not feeling the transformation either. What you’re feeling is a quiet, uncomfortable hum that says: This might not be right.
Here’s what nobody tells you about New Year’s resolutions: sometimes the most growth-oriented thing you can do is change them. Not in February when the guilt has compounded, not after white-knuckling through weeks of resistance, but now. In the first week. While the year is still young enough to bend.
Why Early Doubt Isn’t Failure
The self-help industrial complex has trained us to interpret early resistance as weakness. You set a goal, you feel friction, you push through. Grit. Discipline. No excuses. But behavioral science tells a more nuanced story about what that friction actually means.
Dr. Ayelet Fishbach, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago and author of Get It Done, distinguishes between two types of goal resistance. The first is the predictable discomfort of doing something hard but meaningful. This resistance tends to come with a sense of underlying rightness, a feeling that the difficulty is worth it even when it’s unpleasant. The second type is the dissonance that arises when a goal doesn’t actually align with your values, circumstances, or identity. This resistance feels different: hollow, forced, like you’re performing a version of yourself that doesn’t quite fit.
Most goal-setting advice treats all resistance as the first type. Push through, they say. Motivation follows action. And sometimes that’s true. But when you’re experiencing the second type of resistance, pushing through isn’t building character. It’s deepening a misalignment that will eventually collapse anyway.
The distinction matters because research on goal pursuit consistently shows that intrinsic motivation, wanting something because it genuinely matters to you, predicts success far better than extrinsic motivation, wanting something because you think you should. A 2020 meta-analysis published in the journal Psychological Bulletin found that intrinsically motivated goals were associated with greater persistence, better performance, and higher wellbeing. Goals pursued out of obligation or external pressure showed the opposite pattern.
The Borrowed Goals Problem
Here’s a question worth sitting with: How many of your January goals are actually yours?
We absorb goals the way we absorb accents, unconsciously, from the environments we inhabit. Your Instagram feed shows someone’s 5 AM workout routine, and suddenly waking up early feels like a moral imperative. A colleague mentions their meditation streak, and you add “meditate daily” to your list without examining whether silence and stillness actually appeal to you. The cultural air is thick with borrowed aspirations, and we breathe them in without realizing we’re doing it.
Psychologist Kennon Sheldon at the University of Missouri has spent decades studying what he calls “self-concordant goals,” goals that align with your authentic interests and values rather than external expectations or introjected pressures. His research consistently finds that people who pursue self-concordant goals show more sustained effort, greater goal attainment, and improved wellbeing over time. People pursuing goals that don’t fit them show the opposite: declining motivation, abandonment, and often a sense of personal failure that makes future goal-setting harder.
The tricky part is that borrowed goals don’t announce themselves. They feel like your goals because you genuinely believe them. The desire to wake up early feels real because you genuinely admire people who do it. The meditation goal feels authentic because you genuinely want to be calmer. But admiring something in others and wanting it for yourself are different psychological experiences, and conflating them sets you up for a particular kind of frustration: working hard toward something that won’t actually satisfy you.
How to Know If Your Goal Needs to Change
So how do you tell the difference between productive discomfort and fundamental misalignment? There’s no perfect formula, but there are questions that can help clarify.
Ask yourself what success would actually feel like. Not the Instagram version of success, not the version you’d tell others about, but the private, internal experience. When you imagine having achieved this goal, do you feel relief, excitement, or pride? Or do you feel… nothing? Sometimes the fantasy of a goal is more appealing than the reality of having it, and that’s useful information.
Notice where the goal came from. Can you trace it back to a specific moment of genuine desire, or does it feel more like something you’ve always assumed you should want? Goals that emerge from comparison, obligation, or the vague sense that you’re “supposed to” are worth examining more closely. They might still be worth pursuing, but they need to be chosen deliberately rather than inherited passively.
Pay attention to the quality of your resistance. This is subtle, but important. The resistance to a meaningful goal tends to feel like fear of failure or fear of success. It has energy in it, even if that energy is anxious. The resistance to a misaligned goal feels more like depletion, like you’re trying to make yourself care about something your deeper self isn’t interested in. One is a dragon guarding treasure; the other is a wall with nothing behind it.
The Permission to Pivot
If you’ve recognized that a goal isn’t right, the next step isn’t to abandon goal-setting entirely. It’s to pivot with intention.
A pivot isn’t a retreat. It’s a strategic redirection based on new information. In startup culture, pivoting is celebrated as a sign of responsiveness and intelligence. A company that rigidly pursues its original vision despite market feedback is considered stubborn, not disciplined. We should extend the same logic to personal goals.
Here’s what a healthy pivot looks like. First, acknowledge what the original goal was trying to address. Your 6 AM wake-up goal might have been an attempt to create space for yourself before the demands of the day take over. The meditation goal might have been seeking calm in a mind that won’t slow down. The underlying need is usually valid even when the specific strategy isn’t right. Pivoting means finding a different path to the same destination.
Second, release the sunk cost thinking. Yes, you announced this goal. Yes, you bought the equipment or downloaded the app or told your partner. But continuing to pursue a misaligned goal because you’ve already invested in it is the definition of the sunk cost fallacy. The investment is gone regardless. The question is only what you do now.
Third, give yourself a specific timeline for the new approach. Pivoting isn’t the same as endlessly switching. Choose a new goal or modified approach and commit to it for a defined period, maybe 30 days, before reassessing again. This prevents both rigid attachment and restless abandonment.
Rewriting Your January Story
The narrative we tell ourselves about January matters more than we realize. If January is the month when you fail at resolutions, that story becomes self-fulfilling. But if January is the month when you learn what actually works for you, when you develop the self-awareness to distinguish between meaningful challenge and fundamental misalignment, that’s a different story entirely.
Consider this reframe: the goal of January isn’t to execute a perfect plan. The goal is to gather information about yourself under real conditions. December planning happens in a vacuum, full of optimism and abstraction. January is where those plans meet reality, where you discover which aspirations have traction and which were wishful thinking. That discovery process isn’t failure. It’s the point.
The people who build sustainable habits over time aren’t the ones who perfectly execute their January 1st plans. They’re the ones who iterate, who adjust based on feedback, who treat their own lives as ongoing experiments rather than pass/fail tests. Research on behavior change consistently shows that flexibility predicts long-term success better than rigid adherence. The ability to modify your approach when something isn’t working is a feature, not a bug.
Your Invitation
If something about your New Year’s goals feels off, this is your permission slip to investigate. Not to give up, but to get curious. To ask whether the resistance you’re feeling is the productive kind that precedes growth or the depleting kind that signals misalignment.
Sit with these questions this week. What was I really hoping to feel or experience through this goal? Is there another path to that same outcome? Am I pursuing this because I want it, or because I think I should want it?
You don’t have to have all the answers. You just have to be willing to ask the questions honestly. The year is young, and you’re allowed to let it evolve alongside you. The most successful people aren’t the ones who never change their minds. They’re the ones who change their minds well, with intention and self-compassion, based on real information about what works for them.
That might mean adjusting your 6 AM goal to 7 AM. It might mean replacing meditation with walking. It might mean admitting that the side project isn’t calling to you this year, and something else is. Whatever the pivot looks like, making it now, in early January, while the slate is still fresh, is one of the most growth-oriented things you can do.
This isn’t about lowering your standards. It’s about raising your self-awareness. And that’s a goal worth keeping.
