A Curious Resolution

New Year’s Day is the ultimate holiday for chronically optimistic growth junkies, like me.

I cry easily and often, enjoy bouts of melancholy, harbor fears about how my deepest desires may never be realized, and yet… At the end of the day, I’m still a young golden retriever who just knows she’s about to get taken on a WALK! Limiting beliefs are over-short leashes and too-tight collars. Self-destructive habits are like being stuck inside a tiny apartment with no windows. Naps are wonderful, but being stuck inside all the time — is prison. And it will probably lead to the chewing of couch cushions. So, the way I see it, New Year’s can be about getting unstuck, about getting our real needs met, and about making sure we have appropriate outlets for our energies.

Arbitrary as it may be, when the calendar year changes it feels like everyone in the Gregorian universe is yelling “DO-OVER” all at once! All the unfinished tasks on the whiteboard can be squeegeed off, leaving a wondrously blank space for new plans (and better obscene stick figure drawings). And as we realize that we will never write 2014 on an overdue rent check ever again, we are reminded that we too are capable of updating our lives so radically that some aspect of our current selves could be forever changed — it’s both scary and exciting.

What will be the vehicle for transporting us between the outdated versions of ourselves and our future upgrades? Resolutions.

As costumes are to Halloween, resolutions are to New Year’s Day. “Goals” get set all year, but who’s making a personal “resolution” on 5/17? Individual resolutions feel like the special province of the hopeful 1/1 holiday. Implicit in the word itself is the sense that we now possess the fresh resolve needed to bring our new plans to fruition. However, according to several internet articles I’ve read (no citation, but there were studies involved, promise) less than half of the people who make New Year’s resolutions, keep them.

I am neither a psychologist, nor a scientist. I do have an abundance of thoughts and feelings, and an established practice of observing and analyzing both. Calling upon my 35 years of research and testing in the field of being me, I have devised a hypothesis for how I might find myself among the small-ish percentage of people who do follow through on their New Year’s intentions: I’m not going to make a resolution, I am going to commit to a year long experiment.

Reframing the idea of “making a resolution” as “committing to an experiment” may just seem like a semantical game, but for me the switch is a game-changer. While setting a goal, or making a resolution, draws heavily upon my willpower — running an experiment calls upon my curiosity, and my curiosity can arm wrestle my willpower to the floor any day. My curiosity is also better able to expose my true motivations for wanting to make a particular change in my life.

One of the things that bears examination when we set a goal is what pre-determined assumptions we may have secretly built in to it. If we’ve created a weight-loss goal for example, are we assuming that we will have better self-esteem, or better luck in love once we succeed at losing weight? What if, upon meeting the weight-loss goal, we don’t experience the things we’ve unconsciously assumed we will? What will we have learned? Will the “success” feel strangely hollow? And if we fail to meet the goal, what will we have learned?

What if we reframed a weight loss goal as an honest experiment, and asked ourselves — How will my life change if I lose 25 lbs? Or instead of making a resolution to lose 25 pounds, what if we ran the experiment — What is the funnest way I can lose 25 lbs this year? Experiments with open ended questions can lead to all kinds of discoveries, and ensure that we will learn something valuable along the way regardless of whether we fully meet our original goals or not. Equations where the only outcome potentials are failing or succeeding feel stressful, and boring, to me. Unknowns excite me towards continual engagement in a pursuit of answers. I’m hypothesizing that this is exactly the kind of intrigue I need to help me stay committed to my 2015 experiment.

The relationship between keeping commitments and building trust is strong and direct. Thus, I have to take commitments seriously, including those I make to myself. I am not only the two-year old golden retriever who desperately wants to go outside and sniff around; I am also the dog owner coming home tired from work thinking that going outside in the cold rain sounds terrible, while sitting on the couch eating chips sounds awesome. Ultimately, my willpower and my curiosity have to be friends.

Regardless of how we frame our efforts, when we create a New Year’s challenge for ourselves there will likely be the need to push past inertia, overcome the habitual, and exit the comfort zone. The great thing is that when I force myself to take my figurative dog out for a walk in the rain, I almost always end up really liking it once I get going. And even if I don’t, I get to keep my couch cushions intact and we have somewhere to sit and cuddle when we get back. I’m committed to my dog’s wellbeing, so my dog tries to behave well — trust builds, and the relationship deepens and sweetens. Yes, this is all a big, sloppy, floppy-eared metaphor for self-care and self-love. My inner child is a puppy.

The very best part of viewing resolutions through the lens of the scientific method is that it naturally leads us away from the kind of unhelpful self-judgement that so often crops up when we want to improve ourselves. Commonly, not achieving a desired outcome will leave us asking — Why can’t I do this?! And then answering ourselves with some variation of the devil’s favorite phrase — Because you’re not good enough. If we choose the role of curious researchers, we can instead say to ourselves — Hmmmm…How might I do this differently; what variables should I change the next time I run the experiment? A chorus of much kinder, more interesting voices can then start making suggestions.

Based on many years of previous experimentation, one thing I know for sure is that working on changing something about myself out of love feels different from trying to change so that I will become more lovable. Overtly, the goal might look the same, but internally, the results will vary substantially. It takes work to unearth our true motivations; it takes work to build inner trust; it takes work to identify our changing needs and desires, and even more work to healthfully fulfill them. It is this work we can undertake with renewed willingness and inquisitiveness at the beginning of each year.

At its best, New Year’s Day can be a holiday that’s about creating opportunities for movement, exploration and joy. I’m looking forward to a year of dedicated investigation. Hello 2015, let’s go for a walk…

Originally posted on my new blog First Word Moon http://firstwordmoon.blogspot.com/