The Two Rules You Must Follow When Making New Years Resolutions, Or They Will Not Stick
Well, we are close to a month and a half into 2018. Certainly some of you have made New Years Resolutions. But if you’re like most of us, 40% according to a report on New Years Resolutions, your resolution has already fallen by the wayside.
Why is it so difficult to make resolutions stick? Two reasons: first is the opportune moment. There are stages in the healing process, one of which is about making a commitment to yourself and making the decision to act in your life in accordance with that new commitment. The trick to the smoothest healing experience is to connect with the particular stage that most of you are in right now. When you do that, what is required of you becomes easy. When you try to make a stage happen, it takes a lot of effort and will be very difficult to sustain. So while the New Year is a good time to make a resolution, the time may not be right for you. Pay more attention to the issues that come up in your life and see if you can trust them a little more.
The second reason that resolutions fail has to do with the motivation to make the resolution in the first place. I suggest that if we look closely, we will notice a subtle feeling of worthlessness and a story that says something like, “Ugh, I hate how I’m so fat. Or what’s wrong with me? I have to get my shit together.” In essence, it is pushing a part of ourselves that drives us to resolution.
But it is a fact of healing that we can never push a part of ourselves hard enough to escape it. The feeling of uselessness and the history that accompanies it does not disappear just because we see ourselves better in the mirror or because our wardrobe is more stylish now. Then it becomes difficult to justify maintaining the new action when the reason for doing so was so that we would not have to feel the futility or listen to ourselves tell the story.
What we have to do is raise more awareness about that feeling and the story and give it permission to feel without rejecting it. In the process, our heart opens to a disowned part of ourselves and we are integrating it. When that part of us is more integrated, we can hold it compassionately, and when that is the case, our resolutions tend to be motivated by the desire for greater integrity. When that is combined with the right timing, the change will happen so quickly and completely that you won’t believe it.