#038: A Resolution
New Year’s right around the corner, and you, like most people, will probably make a New Year’s resolution that you already know you’re not going to keep. Announcing your big, audacious goal for 2018 to the world is a great way to make conversation, and yourself feel better, but it’s also a sure way of setting yourself up for failure.
Going to the gym 3 times a week if you’ve never been to the gym at all before won’t work out. Losing 10 kg won’t happen if you’re already having trouble keeping your current weight. Your new fitness tracker telling you how many calories you have left won’t change your weight. Spend less time on Facebook? Mark Zuckerberg is laughing at you already.
For better and for worse, we humans are creatures of habit, and creating new, big habits out of nothing rarely works out for us. Changing yourself when your identity is tied to the old is especially hard. Quitting smoking is easier if you don’t think of yourself as a smoker. Losing weight is natural for you if you are someone who eats healthy. Being a gym rat comes easy if you are a fit person in the first place.
That’s kind of obvious, but also highlights how much your identity forms your habits, and vice versa. If you think of yourself as a gourmet, it’s easy justifying eating a lot of good food. If you think of yourself as a lazy slob, you won’t suddenly go to the gym 3 times a week. Your identity matters a lot.
The good news is that your identity is not fixed, and changing it will help you change your habits. By focusing on becoming a person who mostly eats healthy (Eat food. Not too much. Mostly greens.), your body will change almost as an afterthought. By focusing on becoming someone who is active, who moves each day, you will automatically become fitter as a result. None of this will happen over night, or even within a month, but if you make small changes, big changes will happen eventually.
And after all, what you really want is not a certain number on your scale, or a minimum number of days spent in the gym, you want to look good naked. You want to spend guilt-free time on things you love doing, not someone who is very good at getting things done. Weight and tasks done can be good proxies, but they aren’t what you’re working for.
In that spirit, here’s a few things about myself I’d like to evolve over the coming year:
- Learn to say “No”: A good “no” doesn’t close doors, and won’t antagonize anyone, but I’ll still worry about those things. So I’ll start out by saying “not right now” instead, because that keeps my Fear Of Missing Out at bay.
- Instead of worrying about being motivated enough, change my environments to support what I want to do.
- In fact, worry less.