One thing I like to do at the end of every year is look back on how I spent the last 12 months. This past year was like no other. There were a lot of surprises. A lot of reasons goals were more difficult to achieve. A lot of forces in play.
It’s possibly more important to reflect on this year than any other year. My reflection practice follows loosely the same structure every year. I’ll go through my usual practice of asking myself tough questions about my successes and failures — and to be brutally honest with my replies. But this year, there’s another layer.
The overtone is, what did I overcome?
Now, this exercise must be done with some dedicated effort. A passing read through the questions while nodding only to forget about them in twenty minutes won’t get the job done. Discuss them with a friend, spouse, or loved one to make them real. Write them down on a piece of paper, or type your answers out. However you pay special attention to this exercise, give careful, thoughtful answers. This is about resolutions, but even more than that, this is about dialogue. Open, honest dialogue between your multiple selves, between the person that should be doing this or would rather be accomplishing that, and the person who does neither but desperately wants to. The resolutions will come, but expect it to take a little work. Let’s get to it…
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Over the years, you may have adopted health practices that made you feel better in your day-to-day life. Maybe you kept your sugar consumption low, you gave up alcohol, or you pass on grains. If you brought old habits back when times got tough, it doesn’t mean you’re weak. It means you’ve identified something you need to look out for when you’re under stress. Don’t punish yourself for it. Recognize it as something you learned about yourself.
Frame it as: When things feel hopeless, I crave sugar, so I know now to know to be ready for sugar cravings when I’m stressed.
Not: I was such a bad person for eating so much sugar in 2020.
Maybe you got a new diagnosis, or you caught what’s going around. Maybe you had some shakeups in your career. We learn amazing things about ourselves and our capacities when faced with unavoidable hardships that must be endured. These reveal weak points, and strong points. They reveal room for improvement and areas where we deserve congratulation. Reflect on both sides of it.
I suspect a lot of you overcame a lot, and deserve a lot of credit for how you faced your individual challenges.
If you defected from your normal eating patterns this year when things got rocky, look at it as an opportunity. There’s a good chance you felt the effects, and the effects were probably more pronounced than before. Use this as information and as an impetus for action. Avoiding food that makes you feel awful, then, is one of the most basic, fundamental resolutions a person interested in self improvement can make. By listing, in lurid, excruciating detail, the effect this food or foods have on you, the resolution will fall into place on its own – because how can you possibly ignore it?
“Eat healthier” is a worthy goal. “Improve my fitness” is great. “Learn this skill” is one of my favorites. “Get outside more” is an admirable goal. But how do you actually do it? What does it mean? How are you going to accomplish those things? Those are abstract resolutions, the kind we all make, because they’re simple and easy to come up with. Everyone wants to “be a better person.” But it’s ultimately meaningless unless direct actionable steps are taken that get you closer to its realization.
It’s a very fundamental question that works on several levels. What lifestyle choices led up to your current standing? Make any dietary changes? Exercise more, exercise less, exercise differently? What external forces landed you here – economic or pandemic related? If “where you are” is a bad place, understanding how you got there will show you how to approach the future. If you’re in a good place, understanding how you got there will help you maintain the upward trajectory. You can’t establish causation or isolate all variables, but this isn’t peer review. This is about making some good, effective resolutions.
Many, maybe most, New Year’s resolutions go unresolved because they exist only in the ether. No one but the person making them knows of their existence, and even that person usually avoids taking any real steps to make sure he’s sticking to the plan – if there’s a plan at all. So ask yourself how you’re going to avoid that common pitfall. Maybe you tell a friend. Maybe you track your progress in a journal. Work in some form of accountability.
While we all need to look inward, self-reflections are often (or maybe always) biased. We see what we want to see, even when we’re trying to do some serious soul-searching. To bypass that potential problem, take a moment to think back on any criticism you’ve received from other people, even off the cuff stuff. What might have seemed like a malicious, undeserved attack at the time could actually be a legitimate blind spot that may serve you well to confront. Answers lie outside of us, too. How you appear to others might be an indication of how you actually are. A lot of the time, the other person’s insecurities makes them say things that have no merit, but it’s worth evaluating.
We make a lot of resolutions that sound awesome, giving little thought to the fact that many changes are hard. They require work, and sacrifice, and, well, change – which is hard in and of itself. You’ve got a few vague ideas about changes you’d like to make, or maybe even some definite ones. Lay out all the things that might go into your resolution, and be a little pessimistic. Make it sound worse than it (probably) will be, because things rarely go smoothly. Do you still want to make that change?
Just as the most effective type of exercise is the kind that you actually enjoy and are willing to do consistently, the most effective kind of fitness resolution aims to solve a problem that you actually have. Think about the physical acts you’d like to be able to perform but currently cannot, like comfortably sit in a squat for ten minutes, play full-court pickup basketball on the “good court,” hike the local mountain without feeling like you’re dying, do a pullup, or deadlift twice your bodyweight. It could be anything, really, as long as it’s something you actively want to do. To arrive at a fitness resolution that will serve a needed deficit in your life, identify the deficits.
Take stock of what you’re up against, even (or especially) if its your own procrastination. That way, you’re not blindsided when stuff doesn’t fall into place immediately. And hey, you might even make mini-resolutions to deal with these opponents (you might have to, in fact). Let’s hope you don’t have an actual human arch-nemesis who’s trying to thwart your every move and sporting an evil-looking pencil thin mustache (although on second thought, that could be an incredible motivator) and you’re only talking in the abstract here.
It’s a common question, for good reason: it gets to the heart of what makes you tick. Knowing what you want out of life – in a big picture kind of way – will help you formulate effective resolutions that will actually get you closer to that goal. The funny thing about this one is that having excellent health usually figures prominently in the answer.
Spend some quality time going over these questions, either with yourself or with someone else. Talk them out. Write your answers down. Then, see how you feel about your New Year’s resolutions. See if you want to make any new ones or modify the ones you already have.
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Ⓒ 2023 Mark's Daily Apple
