Open when… you need some willpower to get started

In this guest blog post, Dr Julie Smith – who has recently published her new book Open When – shares her advice on how to stick to positive changes throughout 2025.

“Remember the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.” – Henry Ford

If you want to maximise your chances of making your positive changes stick beyond the new year, check out these top tips from my new book, Open When.

1. Ask yourself some tough questions

While there is some merit in visualizing how wonderful everything will be when you reach your goals, a less gentle but more potent tool for activating yourself is to get real about the answers to these questions:

• Every time you don’t start today, what is the payoff? When you are familiar with what is tempting you to keep things the same, you have something to work with.
• What are the true consequences of not making this change? Delaying positive action is choosing something else for yourself, so get familiar with all the ways you pay a price for that.

2. Predict your failure

This means plan for the worst days, anticipating all the potential hurdles, and create a detailed, concrete plan to tackle each one. Without doing this early on, you leave your future in the hands of your impulses and those natural fluctuations in willpower.

• What are the barriers up ahead that pose a risk to your success?
• What are all the excuses and justifications you might use to make it feel more acceptable to slip off track in those moments?
• Now set out your plan to get around those potential roadblocks before they come up.

3. Prepare to succeed

There are some basic ingredients that make up positive action. At the core of them all is enough rest and replenishment. You wouldn’t expect to produce bread without flour, and you shouldn’t expect to produce your best without rest.

4. Make friends with stress

The shift from relaxed and resting to energetic and lively can make you feel agitated and uncomfortable. This is because the energy release you need to get going and the sensations that come with it come from your stress response. So, if we want to feel energized to strive toward those goals, we need to recognize the utility of that restless feeling and take the opportunity to welcome all that comes with it. Then the discomfort of activation energy can’t hold us back.

5. Connect with your future self

The future always feels far away and less relevant than everything on our plate right now. But studies have shown that when we feel disconnected from our future self in this way, we are more likely to disregard the future consequences of today’s bad choices and act on impulse instead. Strengthening that sense of continuity between who we are today and who we will be in the future helps us feel more willing to put the work in today.

• Try this: take a few moments to close your eyes and imagine yourself a week or a month from now, looking back on the choices you are making today. How will your future-self feel when you look back on today’s actions? See if you can write a note to your future self and tell them what you are going to do now to make life better for them.

All of these tips and more are from my book, Open When. Available now online or in all good book stores. You can also find me on Instagram, Youtube and TikTok.