Over 45% of the US population has losing weight on their list of 2019 resolutions. Almost half of the population. We’ve reached record numbers of obesity and every time you turn around there’s another fad diet on the market.

Keto, Atkins, South Beach, Paleo, Weight Watchers, Zone, Raw Food, and the list goes on.

Typically you must follow a strict set of rules around what you eat, when you eat, and how often you exercise. It’s a life changing, short term solution. And when you stick to it, it works.

Let’s be fair, sticking to a completely new regimen is challenging. I’ll tell you why most people fail. You probably have a route you take to work, and a time you need to leave by. That’s your current regimen. If you changed the route and added two stops along the way (ever day) you’d need to change when you left. Which means changing when you wake up. Which means changing when you go to sleep. Which means changing your whole evening routine. If just one of these things falls apart, you are either poorly rested or late to work – and you give up the new routine.

But there is a solution, and it applies to recruiting.

It’s easy to come up with a list of everything your going to do on your desk this year.

• Bill a million dollars
• Make an absurd number of calls a day
• Designate time for sourcing, recruiting and business development at specific times each day
• Start a content marketing strategy to get clients to come to you
• Keep track of every metric imaginable
• Evaluate and select a new ATS system and get all your data moved
• Write a complete plan for each day with all the calls you’re going to make
• Become an expert at Boolean logic to source candidates
• Write a book about recruiting to send to candidates or clients
• Start speaking on relevant topics in your niche

I’m sure you can come up with 20 more things to add to our hypothetical 2019 Recruiters’ Resolutions.

There’s a reason we set ourselves up for failure when we take this approach. It’s our route to work, but with 20 new stops added.

The best way to lose weight isn’t to diet. The best way to lose weight is change your lifestyle. It’s slower, the results take more time, but it’s manageable. The best way to become a big biller isn’t to write a lot of grand goals on a piece of paper. In order to achieve your objectives, you need to change your recruiting lifestyle.

Humans are reluctant to change. The more things you need to change, the higher the likelihood is that you will fail. It’s easy to not complete one thing and then give up on the day (or the week/month/year.)

Instead, pick one thing that you’re going to change. Only one.

On Friday I was talking to one of our coaching students, Bill, and here’s what I told him. The secret is in consistently doing the work.

If you want to make changes in 2019, add a habit related to your work ethic. Here are some suggestions:

• When it’s time to leave for the day, make one more phone call.
• Start your day with 5 business development calls.
• When the day is over, spend 30 minutes on your own personal development.
• Every weekend spend 2 hours sourcing for calls in the upcoming week.
• Log 30 hours of call time per week.

But you can only pick one. For each additional change you attempt to implement, you’ll increase your likelihood of failure. From our earlier analogy, you can stop for coffee on the way to work, not to do your weekly shopping.

Once you’ve successfully integrated a single change into your recruiting desk, and have maintained it for one month, add another.

Too many changes at once is a recipe for failure. Tell me in the comments one change you can make to your desk, that you can fully commit to long term.