Resolving to Make 2011 Your Best Year Yet - Part 1: Making Resolutions Work
Making Resolutions Work
Ah, yes. It’s that time of year again, following a month of end-of-year excess, of seasonal reveling, of Winter Solstice/Christmas/Chaunukah/Kwansaa/New Year/Three Kings/insert-your-holiday-of-choice-here festivities, many of us take a moment to take stock, assess, evaluate, and consider the coming year. What’s next. What’s not good enough. What could be better. What needs improving. What we really want to have happen in our lives.
The dawning of a new year really does feel like a clean slate, the perfect time to start fresh and usher in those changes we’ve been putting off for months. Losing weight. Exercising more. Eating healthier. Cleaning the closets. Signing up for those courses. Quitting smoking. Pursuing the dream job. Getting out of debt. Insert-your–latest-resolution-here. Months of winter, cold and dark and dull and daunting now that the holidays have passed, provide a relatively distraction-free backdrop during which we can focus on making things better.
So each year, come January 1st, many of us once again dutifully announce our noble intentions to make it happen. This time, we will prevail. This year, we will succeed! Others, the more jaded amongst us, no longer even bother. We’ve tried and failed year after year, so, really, what’s the friggin’ point? Well, here’s the good news: research has shown that, for whatever reason, “people who explicitly make resolutions are 10 times more likely to succeed than people who don’t.”* That’s right: the mere declaration of our intentions ups the ante and increases the chances of manifesting our desires tenfold. In fact, nearly half of us manage to keep our resolutions for a full six months. Reason enough to get clear on your vision for the year and proclaim them from the rooftops.
But why, then, do the rest of us fail utterly, miserably, repeatedly?
I believe the problem is not with resolutions – the improvements we’d like to make in our lives - per se, but our approach to ushering in change. We focus on the wrong things: we try to remove the bud, snip at the stem rather than pull the weed out at its root; we focus on the treating the symptom rather than its underlying cause. Even if we appear to succeed initially, the results probably won’t last; roots still intact, a new bud is bound to form -
Think of taking an aspirin for a headache. Yes, 20 minutes later you may indeed feel relief, because the aspirin has masked the symptom: it has dulled the pain. However, whatever caused the headache in the first place – stress, illness, fatigue, a tumor (God-forbid!), bad diet – hasn’t been addressed. So your headache may return, now or later, and may continue to haunt you until you deal with its root cause(s).
And so it is with resolutions: we tend to attack and try to master the manifestations of our dis-ease, rather than outwit and conquer the core issues that produce them in the first place.
As a result, we generally go about it in the obvious and accepted, but completely ineffective, way. We westerners, so logical and systematic, married to our belief in Newtonian cause-and-effect physics, think that modifying X will result in Y and Z. I’ll use the classic resolution to lose weight as an example:
To drop those pounds, all we have to do is burn more calories than we take in by reducing our caloric intake and/or increasing our caloric expenditure through activity and exercise. Simple, right? Not so fast.
Yes, if we eat less than we burn, we’ll slim down. In the age of information, thanks to the Internet, 24-hour media streams, books, etc., we can easily find ample instruction re the most effective ways to reach our goals - the food plans, the exercise programs, the calorie counts, the healthy recipes, the knowledgeable experts. Many do in fact offer sound advice that could help us move towards looking and feel better. But, despite the abundance of information and services to support and assist us, even when coupled with our best intentions, conviction and determination, we don’t follow the program. We don’t eat less; we don’t exercise more; we don’t adhere to the perfect plan. We know the “what”, we understand the “why”, we’re clear on the “how”, we get the “how much”. Yet we just don’t.
We attribute our inability to keep our resolutions on a lack of willpower, the lack of sunlight, the job, the cold, our spouse, the kids, the dog, insert-your-justification-here. But it goes much deeper than that. These are just artfully designed ruses, legitimate sounding reasons - people, events, you name it – we assign to distract ourselves from the truth …
And it doesn’t matter if we’re talking something small such as cleaning out a closet, or something monumental like getting clean. No matter how intelligent or potentially effective the plan, before we can make it happen, we first need to 1. overcome our internal resistance to change, and 2. figure out what it is we really want, deep down inside - what would really motivate us - to make the changes we say we want.
* http://www.proactivechange.com/resolutions/statistics.htm
© 2011 Theresa Quadrozzi, A-Muse-In-Manhattan
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