New Year, New You? Nice Try

Change — if only it were as simple as a campaign slogan.

It certainly didn’t prove to be for Oprah Winfrey, who recently demonstrated that change — at least lasting change — is often fleeting at best. A few weeks ago, Ms. Winfrey, who once weighed 237 pounds but famously whittled herself down to 160four years ago, appeared on the cover of her O magazine, glumly displaying her new, or old, 200-pound girth.

“I didn’t just fall off the wagon,” she wrote in the January issue. “I let the wagon fall on me.”

Ms. Winfrey is hardly alone — nor is she alone in her vow to set off on (another) road to self-improvement in 2009. But if she succeeds she will be one of the few people to make good on what is essentially a New Year’s resolution.

“Most of us think that we can change our lives if we just summon the willpower and try even harder this time around,” said Alan Deutschman, the former executive director of Unboundary, a firm that counsels corporations on how to navigate change, and the author of “Change or Die,” a book that asserts that even though most people have the ability to change, they rarely do. “It’s exceptionally hard to make life changes,” Mr. Deutschman said, “and our efforts are usually doomed to failure when we try to do it on our own.”

In a season of change, in a year of change, most people who embark on a journey of self-renewal can expect anything but. Research shows that about 80 percent of people who make resolutions on Jan. 1 fall off the wagon by Valentine’s Day, according to Marti Hope Gonzales, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota. Read Article

By Alex Williams