Why Resolutions Don’t Last

How long will it take for us to forget the surreal experience of waking up to Wednesday’s apocalyptic red sky and an eerie orange light? By the time we’ve wiped down the rusty film of dust that covers just about everything we own, both the temporary thrill and subsequent inconvenience will no doubt be forgotten.

And what about our Red Day ‘resolutions’? We may have resolved to be more conscious of our water usage, because we had a brief experience of what it’s like for country dwellers facing drought-induced dust storms. We may have been more aware of our friends or colleagues’ wellbeing, particularly if they suffer asthma or allergies, and decided that sparing more thought for other people is no bad thing. Or we may just have resolved to get the duster out more regularly, because the forced wipedown made us realize that it’s really quite pleasant to have a clean and tidy home.

In reality, though, our Red Day resolutions will probably go the same way as our New Year ones – usually a slow fading into the resolution abyss. In other words, it doesn’t take long to return to our life’s status quo, whatever we’ve experienced.

When we make ‘resolutions’, we’re not really making resolutions at all. Our resolutions would be more aptly called ‘intentions’ because we may have the best of intentions, but not always the best of actions. Intending to do something has a built-in opt-out clause. And that’s just like resolutions – we make resolutions knowing that it’s highly likely we won’t be seeing them through.

So what if we started to make ‘promises’ rather than resolutions? Suddenly the idea seems a whole lot more serious. Now it means that we’re breaking our promise when we don’t carry out what we said we would. Now we’re really committing to something, having to think whether we really can and will keep our word.

Keeping one promise to ourselves is far more powerful than making (and breaking) half a dozen intentions. Next time you go to make a resolution of the ‘intention’ variety, commit to making a promise instead.

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‘Stay on your mat’: the art of doing your own thing

I like the idea of having a regular yoga practice, but unfortunately it’s too far down my list of priorities to ever be more than an infrequent and sporadic intention. It’s still in my ‘should’ basket, not my ‘want to’ basket. However, as well as a few helpful hip stretches I learned, the best thing I took away from my last yoga burst was something the yoga teacher said whilst we were all trying to do a tree pose (which is a difficult balancing-on-one-leg- twisting-arms-in-front pose).

What he said was: ‘stay on your mat’.

He didn’t mean, of course, that we shouldn’t start walking around the room and swapping positions with our classmates; he meant that if we didn’t keep our focus on our own pose but started being aware of what other people were doing, then we would fall over.

(I can guarantee that if you try to balance on one leg without maintaining complete focus on your own pose, then you will have to put your other leg back on the floor. If you’ve ever been to a yoga class, you’ll know that as soon as one person loses their balance, at least half a dozen will quickly follow. Most of us can’t ‘stay on our mat’ for extended periods of time.)

I think ‘staying on your mat’ is a great metaphor for maintaining focus on your own life, and not worrying about what other people are doing.

One of the most disruptive and crippling things we all do to ourselves is compare how well we match up to others. We each have our own mental checklist, and we punish ourselves when we feel that we’re falling short. Our checklist usually includes how attractive we are, how much we weigh, how much money we have, how many possessions we own, how well our career is growing, how good our relationship is. We can always find people who are doing ‘better’ than us in one or more of these areas, which can lead to any degree of discontent, dissatisfaction or even depression.  Conversely, of course, we can find that we compare favourably with others and then we feel better about ourselves in a smug and self-righteous way.

Constantly comparing ourselves to others leads to a constantly discontented life.  Moreover, it leads to us trying to get on someone else’s mat: doing what others are doing in the hope that their ‘success’ in a particular area will rub off on us. We can spend our whole life trying to get on other people’s mat, not realising that our best chance of success and happiness is to focus on our own life, our own pose and our own unique strengths.

Next time you find yourself comparing yourself to others, just remember: ‘stay on your mat’.

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Stress makes you Stupid

In the frantic pace of life that most of us live, ‘stress’ has become an everyday word. Although some degree of stress is quite normal and actually productive, too much stress can be hugely detrimental to our entire wellbeing. The causes and effects of stress are diverse, but needless to say they affect both our psychological and physical state. There are at least 50 common signs and symptoms of stress, and that’s just the common ones.

What is stress?

Our sympathetic nervous system is responsible for the ‘flight or fight response’ that we’re all familiar with – i.e. in periods of high stress, we go into battle or run away and hide. Nowadays, real threats to our survival don’t happen too often but our mind can still tell us that there’s a threat. Our mind can read stress in situations that are real (such as during public speaking), imagined (such as ‘imagining’ the experience of public speaking) and recalled (remembering a time when you had to speak in public). In other words, it doesn’t really matter whether something has happened, is happening or is about to happen, our mind can read this as stressful.

When we think a situation is stressful, adrenalin gets released into our blood stream and the effects include hyperarousal (you feel really alert) and increased physical performance (you can do things really quickly).

You can see that activation of the sympathetic nervous system has its uses. Feeling very alert and doing things really quickly benefits all of us at times.

The trouble comes when this goes from being a temporary state to a permanent one.

When your ‘flight or fight response’ never switches off, you’re likely to notice:

· Disrupted sleep patterns (including more dreaming)

· Lowered tolerance for everyday problems

· Negative feelings of self-worth

· More intense emotional state, including tearfulness, anger, impatience

· Inability to concentrate

· Inability to make decisions

· Digestive problems

· Skin outbreaks

· Drinking more, smoking more, eating more/less

Some of the things you won’t notice, but which are still happening when your stress continues, are:

· Thyroid/endocrine burnout

· Brain damage

· Obesity/diabetes

· Immune suppression

· Infertility

· Autoimmune stress related diseases

· Cancer

· High blood pressure

· Heart disease, cardiac failure

The Effects of Stress

Getting off the Stress Coaster

Fortunately, the sympathetic nervous system is complemented by its parasympathetic opposite. If you think of the sympathetic nervous system as the accelerator, the parasympathetic nervous system is the brake.

The parasympathetic nervous system helps to decrease heart rate, slow down breathing, improve digestion, regulate moods, rebuild cells, and generally relaxes and restores us.

Although on the face of it we all say we’d like to be less stressed, the truth is it can be addictive. Feeling sharp, working at a fast pace, going a whole day without food…it can all feel quite euphoric. But the system is designed to be temporary, not a permanent state of being. You may be able to live with the odd skin outbreak, a few bad nights of sleep and jumping down people’s throats for no reason, but if you get to the point when you get so burnt out that you can’t go to work, your partner tells you enough’s enough and you’re told that hypertension medication wouldn’t do any harm…well, that’s when it’s reached a whole new level.

Making a New Start

A good start to reducing your stress levels is to accept and acknowledge the stressors in your life.

Write a list of stressors that are out of your control (external stresssors) – such as a traffic jam, being kept waiting, your boss making unreasonable demands.

Next write a list of stressors that you do have control over – such as being late for a meeting, emotional eating, and lashing out at someone.

Think about how your mind and body reacts to stress – see the diagram above for a whole range of symptoms.

Finally, take some time out to really think about what can help you to manage your stress levels better. Here’s a few suggestions:

· Go to bed earlier

· Take regular time out for yourself

· Have a massage

· Walk to/from work

· Have a lunch break

· Breathe more deeply

· Do something just for fun

· Watch DVDs all of Sunday

· Leave home earlier for work

· Leave work earlier for home

· Learn to meditate

Start managing your stress today, before it starts managing you…

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Spotting your Saboteur

It would be quite fair to say that most of us sabotage ourselves on a daily basis. But because sabotage takes place at both a conscious and unconscious level, we may not even know we’re doing it. Regardless of whether we’re aware of it or not, our saboteur plays an enormous role in all of our lives.

This thing called a saboteur is a part of us, not some sort of external negative force that plays havoc with our very existence. It may seem that its sole purpose is to destroy and destruct, but if we learn to understand our saboteur it can help us to confront the fears we have of maximising our potential and feeling empowered.

The saboteur in action

At first glance it may seem facetious to say we don’t want to maximise our potential. But whether it’s in our relationships, our work, our health, our finances or our hobbies, there are always implications to making changes and the saboteur challenges us every step of the way.

Consciously or not, when we imagine living at our highest potential we say to ourselves ‘I don’t want to be/do xxx because then I will have to be/do yyy…’. The saboteur pricks up its ears and jumps in to make darn sure we abort our repeated attempts to make changes.

An example

Jane decides over the weekend she wants to be healthier. She’s been feeling tired and sluggish and keeps snapping at her colleagues. She decides she’s going to go to bed earlier, eat breakfast every day, cut down to just one coffee in the morning, exercise three times a week and stop her excessive drinking at the weekends.

On Monday morning the blast of her alarm wakes her up, but she presses the snooze button and turns over. By the time she drags herself out of bed it’s too late for breakfast so she just runs out the door to get to work on time. Jane’s so tired after a late night on Sunday that she has a couple of coffees before mid-morning and because she was late leaving home she left her gym bag in the kitchen.

Already Jane has sabotaged almost every resolve she had to live a healthier life and it’s not even Monday lunchtime.

Why do we sabotage?

Why we sabotage is the million dollar question. That’s exactly the question we continually need to ask ourselves to understand the inherent fear we all have of maximising our potential. It’s not enough just to acknowledge a fear, though that in itself is hard enough. What’s more important is really getting to understand what drives our choice to remain less empowered than we all know we can be.

This takes time, effort, resolve and practice.

Listening out for the saboteur

We know we are sabotaging ourselves when we say things like ‘I would have…’, ‘I should have…’ and ‘I could have…’ . Words such as ‘but’, ‘if’ and ‘when’ are also favourites of the saboteur. When you hear yourself saying this – to yourself or to others – your saboteur radar should be working overtime.

Paying attention

The starting point to working with your saboteur is to pay attention to how your saboteur operates:

·       What sort of language do you use?

·       How often have you made excuses and broken your word to yourself?

·       When have you resolved to do something only to break your promise to yourself the very next day, week or month?

·       In what areas of your life does your saboteur have the strongest hold?

·       How frequently do you let yourself off the hook?

Taking the first step

So often we make a strong resolve, such as Jane in the example, only to go into overwhelm because of the amount of change we want to make. This is shortly followed by sabotage behaviour, and the cycle continues.

Do you really want to make changes that will positively impact your life right from this moment?

Then take the first, small step by thinking of a decision you can make by the end of today that would immediately make you feel more empowered and improve your self-esteem.

This could be anything but it should be one small change. This one small change, and each small change thereafter, is symbolic of your decision to move yourself forward in some way. You are choosing to change your life, and each time your saboteur comes forth you are also choosing to look at why you are aborting your own attempt to get one step closer to your highest potential.  

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‘Specific Goals’ Suck

I think setting goals is overrated. Everywhere I turn nowadays I hear people talking about the necessity of setting goals – from life coaches to financial planners to car salesmen. What are our short term goals? What are our long term goals? And what about the goals in between?

 

I used to set work goals for both myself and for people in my team. They were perfectly defined SMART goals (specific –measurable – achievable – realistic – timed) and I had a real good-factor when I’d set, and worked on, goals for myself and my team. Being a compliant employee, I would always aim to achieve my goals and I certainly got satisfaction in that respect. But nowadays, when I have given myself the choice of how I work and what I want to focus on, I never set goals.

 

Why?

 

Setting goals is way too easy. But they often have little foundation behind them. Goals often come from a knee-jerk reaction to something we don’t like or don’t want in our life anymore – a goal to lose 5kgs, to go to the gym 3 times a week, to stop drinking for a month, to earn more money. These types of goals can be very temporary and are built on shaky ground.

 

Goals can be yet another ‘should’ in our lives. “I should go to the gym to achieve my goal even though I have a cold/am exhausted”; “I should go for that new job because it’s a pay-rise even though I’m not even in the career I want to be in.” Do we really need any more shoulds?

 

But most importantly, goals shut down our creativity. Having specific, measured, realistic and timed goals limit our potential to see all the opportunities that exist to achieve what we want to achieve.

 

Rather than goals, I think we should expand their scope into a vision that we want for our lives. I think our vision would be better associated to how we want to feel.

 

For example, rather than having a goal of going to the gym 3 times a week, I would instead have a vision of health, because I want to feel healthy and vital. This becomes a lifestyle choice that places less importance on just getting my 3 gym workouts done.

 

If I was still setting my SMART goals as I used to, I would have missed out on many opportunities to choose creative pathways towards my broad vision for myself.

 

What do you think about goals?

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