THAT'S MEN:We are goal-driven beings, so resolutions matter, writes PADRAIG O'MORAIN
“Change your life”: Rilke tells me;
incapable of this, I put on
a new pair of socks instead. My face
the poster for a failed revolution.
SO WRITES Galway-based poet Kevin Higgins in his recent witty and sometimes wicked (laughing at the demise of the Celtic Tiger, I fear) collection Frightening New Furniture.
The point of these lines, for me, is not the reference to Rilke. The point is that it is so typical of us human beings to put off changing our lives while we put on a new pair of socks.
Many of us, I’m afraid, are posters for a failed revolution, to use Higgins’ phrase.
This week many of us are plotting revolutions in our lives – by and large, aimed at improving our unsatisfactory selves.
As experience tells us only too well, however, most of these revolutions will fail. They are, after all, being plotted by the same unsatisfactory selves that they are meant to reform, so we need hardly be surprised that our resolutions so often turn out not to be the real thing. Neither should we be surprised that our unsatisfactory selves, which face the chop if our resolutions and revolutions succeed, suggest that we might try on our new socks before we sally forth, all guns blazing.
What’s to be done? Accept, I suppose, that much of the change in ourselves will come from the press of events and experience rather than from resolutions.
We’re rather like stones and pebbles that get the rough bits knocked off them over millions of years, leaving them nice and smooth. Stones don’t sit down and write out a list of New Year resolutions.
Accepting all that, though, we still have to make at least some resolutions. We seem to be goal-driven beings, however odd our goals may sometimes be, and we don’t have millions of years to get ourselves smoothed out.
So here’s something to try. It’s a motivation exercise by writer and life coach Steven Weir and I found it in Writing Works, a handbook of therapeutic writing exercises.
When I was preparing a workshop earlier this year, I tried the exercise out on myself.
I chose as a goal a project I had been putting off since 2008. Five minutes after I did the exercise, I sent the e-mail which got the project up and running, successfully, now and into the future. I have since spoken to another person for whom it had the same effect.
You’ll need pen, paper or computer for this. Begin by choosing a goal that’s important to you. Write it down. Now figure out what you could reasonably achieve within six months. Write that down.
From now on, imagine that you’ve already achieved the goal. Write down the answers to the following questions:
Having achieved the goal, how do you feel about yourself and about your world? Do you walk and talk differently? How do other people respond to you? What’s your day like? Is there anything different in your environment?
Why do you want this goal? What, in yourself or externally, would stop you achieving it?
Think about a success you’ve previously had, whether small or big. What motivated you to pursue that goal? What kept you going?
What’s the one action you need to take to get started on your goal? This will probably be a small action because it’s just getting you started. Where will you take this action? When will you take it?
It takes time to get through this exercise but if it pushes you to achieve just one of your resolutions, it’s worth it.
If you’re going to try this, do it now before the year gets its claws into you and you forget those resolutions.
Remember the words of Edward Young in the 18th century:
Procrastination is the thief of time;
Year after year it steals, till all are fled.
Happy New Year.
Padraig O’Morain (pomorain@ireland.com) is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His book, Light Mind – Mindfulness for Daily Living, is published by Veritas. His mindfulness newsletter is free by e-mail