Image Credit: Pixabay
I wrote a few posts last week about New Year’s Resolutions, here, here and here. It was a good week for me. It was the first week, I put three posts out on the day I promised I would. It wasn’t easy but I forced myself to write them, and I’m grateful I did. It made me feel good and gave me an enormous amount of confidence. Unfortunately, this weekend hit and the motivational stores are running low.
It’s not surprising though. New Year’s Day was last Tuesday and it’s easy for us to ride out the “I have goals and dreams and I’m going after them,” high this time of the year gives us. Now it’s a new week and we lay there realizing we have a “Coyote Ugly” hanging on our arm. Present Us made a promise Future Us has to keep and now it’s time for Us to collect.
But a promise is a promise so we give it the old college try. We’ll begrudgingly stumble to the gym or type random works on a blank word document to find our motivation, all the while grumbling about what an asshole the Past Us was for this resolution.
So what happened to us? How did we go from ultra-motivated to the lazy beatnik who only wants to chillax on the couch? We have our goals, we even came up with a plan, but we are still coming up empty.
The problem is we haven’t changed our identity. We still see ourselves as the same slackers we were last year and don’t think our goals will help us become our own Heroes of Battle. I think James Clear in an interview with Jory MacKay from the RescueTime Blog says it best, “Who is the type of person you want to become? Who is the person that’s already achieving the results you want for yourself? For example, the type of person who loses ten pounds is probably someone who doesn’t miss workouts. That’s just part of their identity. They see themselves as someone who exercises consistently. And going to the gym is just part of their being.”
Maybe the goal is to start the business we’ve put off starting. We just became an Entrepreneur. Maybe it’s time to learn a new language. BAM, now we are linguists. We need to change the way we see ourselves to bring us closer to our end goals.
For me, I want to be a Skald, the badass warrior-poets of the Viking world, similar to the medieval bard. These were the people who fought next to great warriors and passed their stories on from generation to generation. They need to be strong to be a part of the Viking world but also used their intellect rather than spend all their time thinking about raiding. I want to be built like a brick house and write like a philosopher.
Unfortunately, if aren’t willing to focus on the person we want to become it is easy to stay in our rut. If we want to lose weight but don’t see ourselves as a lover of fitness or we want to write but don’t see ourselves as a writer, it’s easy to let our goals slip away. Basically, if we continue to see ourselves as losers this is how we will stay. It’s only when we are willing to change the way we think about ourselves, we are able to affect real change. Sometimes it happens by accident but most of the time it takes time and focused effort.
Still having trouble making the change? Take a page out of Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, proverbial book and try writing it down. Every day he writes down what he wants or who he wants to be on a piece of paper 10-15 times until it comes to fruition. Sometimes it’s quick and other times it can take years but it allows him to focus on the path he’s trying to follow. He used this technique when he wanted to be an illustrator and now he’s the creator of one of the most recognized comic strips in America.
Remember, we will never be the same person we were yesterday and tomorrow we can be whoever we want. Taking time to stay focused on who we want to become will only help bring us closer to our goal. This way, when we are presented with what use to be difficult choices, we already know the right answer. We’ve already made the choice. We can skip the extra piece of cake or the three extra episodes of the show we would normally binge. That’s not us anymore. We are the hero of our own story.
This isn’t a magic bullet. We will still need to put in the work but it will make it easier the more we practice. Good luck.
*Check out James Clear’s article “Identity-Based Habits: How to Actually Stick to your Goals This Year” for more on this topic.*