But as you may also know, I'm a big fan of making positive change, taking incremental steps towards being who and what you really want to be.
Sometimes, the distinction between making a resolution (New Year's or otherwise) and creating change can be a little hard to find. That's especially true if the way you're trying to change is by declaration, rather than through a process.
In other words, if you say, "Starting today, I am going to improve my job performance by always being at work by 7:30 a.m.," you're making a declaration - which is dangerously close (perhaps even identical!) to a resolution. Because it's a declaration, you haven't given yourself any options except to succeed or fail. That, of course, really means that you're setting yourself up for failure. Maybe on some days you'll make it to work by 7:30, but there will be others where you just don't. With this declaration, the first day you're at your desk at 7:45 instead of 7:30, you've failed.
As unhappy as this is, the problem with trying to change by declaration is even bigger and deeper. What could be bigger than setting yourself up for failure? Very simply, you could well be trying to change the wrong habit - and you've given yourself no way to identify what the right habit might be, nor how to support yourself in making the change.
Let's go back to our gung-ho employee who wants to be at his desk by 7:30 every morning. (We won't discuss whether this is the right objective or not, but I do recommend that you evaluate why you want to change a habit - what's the real goal, and will changing this habit bring you closer to the goal?)
Making this a process rather than a declaration starts by setting a flexible objective, such as, "I will be at my desk by 7:30 three out of five weekdays." With this type of statement, you've immediately done two things:
- You are no longer set up to fail, because you have recognized the reality that you won't hit your objective 100% of the time.
- Now that you've expressed your understanding that there will be mornings when you don't get to your desk by 7:30, you can identify why you didn't get there. Likewise, when you are on time, you can identify what supported you.
In our example, the first time our employee misses his 7:30 target, he looks back on his morning and he can see that things started to get delayed before he even got out of bed. It was a gray, chilly morning, and he spent an extra fifteen minutes warm and sleepy under the covers before he was able to get up and start the day. Over time, as he compares his on-target days with the days he's a little late, he sees a repeating pattern: when he's even five or ten minutes late getting up, that time seems to multiply until he's certain to be at least fifteen minutes late getting to work.
Now he has a meaningful insight: The issue isn't what time he's at work; the issue is when he gets out of bed. With this insight, he can direct his attention to changing the right habit: what time does he get up in the morning? If he now sets a goal of getting up on time three out of five days, he can start the process over again, evaluating what it is that prevents him from getting up on time and what supports him. Knowing the importance of his ultimate goal (to improve his performance at work), he may find that he has the fortitude to get up on time even when he'd rather not. Or he may decide that there is another habit that's more worth changing - or that there are other ways to become a model employee!
But if he'd stuck to his original declaration, he would not only have learned nothing, but he would be feeling pretty bad about himself by now, since his declaration would long since have fallen by the wayside in a heap of failures.
What habits are you trying to change, and are you making the change by declaration, or through a process?
"If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going." Professor Irwin Corey, 1914 -, American humorist, comedian, and self-proclaimed "world's foremost authority."
